I love Iosif Stalin. Unfortunately, nobody knows how to write about Iosif Stalin. Not even Stalin himself knew how to write about Stalin, though he knew that Stalin the Figure was not Stalin the Person and behaved accordingly. In terms of the person, he left no diary or journal for his innermost thoughts, his personal letters were carefully guarded, and he was generally not one to doubt himself or write about doubting himself. Into this hole has flooded a deluge of words about Stalin’s personality and psychological makeup, like the nonsense spouted first prominently by Trotsky and Khruschev, and then remixed in a thousand variations by the liberal academic publishing complex. Needless to say, there are abundant biographies about Stalin, and few of them are serious and even fewer are good.

Most of the English-language biographies are on the level of Sebag-Montefiore’s orientalist Young Adult historical adventure fiction.¹ In terms of serious study, Stalin’s tenure in the USSR has gotten a better shake than the man himself, with the rise of the revisionist school of Sovietology in radical liberal academia (surprisingly, one man did not have absolute power over an entire society!).² And even from the Communist side, historical biographies of Stalin published during his rule took care to buff out his sharp points and polish his face smooth — as much as Stalin himself did not enjoy it, he resigned himself to becoming an idol for his people.³ Post-de-Stalinization defenders like Domenico Losurdo and Ludo Martens are much more concerned with Stalin and the USSR more broadly, than they are with the man himself, as a person.

Who the hell was Stalin? No one knows, I’m afraid. But there might be a good guess.

In 1987, Ronald Grigor Suny set out to write another Stalin biography to add to the pile of Stalin biographies in the world. It took him until 2020 to finish the project, as the Soviet Union collapsed in the interim. But besides the unpleasant fact of the capitalist holocaust, this cracked the former government’s archives open to Western scrutiny. Dr. Suny had a field day, digging through pretty much all documentary materials available on Stalin’s pre-revolution life, and produced a 896-page tome of Stalin’s life before the October Revolution. Good for him! He was lauded and attacked for his book, by the peanut gallery of respectable socialists and rabid anti-Communist dogs.⁴

Move over, Stephen Kotkin. Suny’s on the scene!

Suny’s book, based on his excessive archival trawling, makes the argument that the young Stalin can be divided into three phases of his life: Soso, the faithful seminarian, is not Koba, the unseasoned rebel, is not Stalin, the Marxist professional revolutionary. Suny, unlike pretty much every other Stalin biographer, actually has a wide breadth and depth of knowledge of the revolutionary Caucasus, which he exercises to great effect, filling pages on the nuances of Georgian Social Democracy and the various environments that Soso, then Koba, then finally Stalin moved through. He lays out in fine-grained detail how those environments shaped Stalin’s development, his personality, his preferences, and ultimately the man who would be the Stalin we all know and love (or hate) and how Stalin in turn impacted Georgian and Russian Social Democracy as an activist-organizer-revolutionary. How dialectical!

I imagine the book will be tedious for the reader who just wants to know what hijinks our buddy Koba is getting up to next. As an avid hoarder of facts, I really enjoyed those tangents on politics and culture. As distant as the Tsarist-Russian revolutionary milieu seems to us today, filtered through time and historical mythology, it is helpful to remember that these were ultimately just people trying to figure out how to win against their oppressors and then build the first long-lasting socialist experiment in human history. In other words, they had their own version of inane discourse and difficult personalities. The young Koba, too overconfident, kind of an asshole and schemer, is either relatable because you’ve been a Koba or you’ve had to deal with a Koba.

Though Suny is hostile to the later Stalin in power, he treats the young Stalin with a rare amount of care and empathy. Stalin’s personal life (or, whatever existed of a personal life for a professional revolutionary) is elaborated based on actual documentary evidence instead of the sensationalist rumor-mongering that Stalin biographers often indulge in and the real friendships that Stalin had at the time are named for what they were, even if they later ended very badly.

Where the book is weakest is towards its end, where Suny forecloses Stalin’s trajectory into the revolution eating its children, typical of academic petit-bourgeois pessimism. Trillions starved, etc. But arguably what is most valuable about this book is less than what it details about specifically Stalin’s early activities and personal development, but much more about what it details, through those long tangential passages, about the revolutionary Tsarist-Russian underground, about the cruel reality and life-or-death stakes of fighting an autocratic regime in a peripheral region of a reactionary empire, the nagging national question and the various ways that Communists reconciled (or didn’t) with national liberation, and yes, what it details about the nuances of party-building in Tsarist Russia and its borderlands. Suny commentates from outside these internal splits and dynamics within Russian Social Democracy with more than a century of ironic hindsight, but these are debates that the revolutionaries took seriously at the time and so does he. And so should we.

It would be preposterous to suggest that Tsarist Russia is a mirror of the modern day US Empire– and yet, the challenge remains the same for all Communists: how do we build the party to seize power from the bourgeois state? After all, if the particular characteristic of Tsarist Russia was the autocracy, then the particular characteristic of the US Empire is settler-colonialism, a kind of decentralized autocracy. Perhaps Stalin’s experiences in the underground organizing reading circles with students and workers, his brief stint with legal union organizing, his leadership of armed militias during the height of reaction, his activities as a Bolshevik traveling agent always one step ahead of the Okhrana, and finally his role as a tribune of the people in the interim between February and October provide a clue as to what Communists should expect from their work as the US Empire crumbles. Perhaps we should have a closer look at what it actually took to sustain an underground network and an aboveground movement and draw appropriate lessons from it for today, while keeping in mind that our adversaries are just as well-studied as we are.

In lieu of a numerical rating, I’ll tell you who I think should read this book: Baby Communists who only know the myths of anti-Stalin, obsessive enthusiasts of Soviet revolutionary history, active Communists engaged in the hardest questions of national liberation, and anyone who’s read any other biography about Stalin at all.

1. The clearest example of this is his Young Stalin (2007). This critique of Montefiore can be found almost verbatim in the pages of another of the Big Stalin Biographies, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power by Stephen Kotkin. ︎
2. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously is a group biography that argues that the functional dynamic of the top Stalinist leadership was as a team. Stalin was the team leader who delegated responsibilities and had final word on team inclusion or exclusion, but relied on the loyalty and agency of his teammates to carry out day-to-day governance. Stalin’s team did not mindlessly bend to his will; he had to argue his case convincingly and rely on a combination of argument and intrigue to get his team members on board with certain strategies or tactics. ︎
3. Briefly, for more on this, there are these two letters: (1925) and (1938). ︎
4. Funnily enough, Suny wrote about the reception that his book got in third person about himself. ︎

$24.99

In 1978, Hodee Edwards’ Labor Aristocracy first saw print with Aurora Press of Stockholm. In that landmark work, Cde. Edwards cut through the fat of reformist “Social Democracy” in Europe and the settler-relation underlying racial capitalism in the U.S. She revealed, through economic analysis of the presence and source of imperial superprofits, that Lenin’s thesis about the labor aristocracy of the imperialist countries holds more true than ever before — and has been completely obscured by the so-called Marxist-Leninists since the mid 30’s of the last century.

This was work that had begun by Communist luminaries like Samir Amin (Accumulation on a World Scale, 1971; Unequal Development, 1973). Edwards’ book is a thoroughgoing analysis of the imperialist system as it existed in the 1960s and 1970s. It unsparingly excoriates the Marxists who have refused to heed Lenin’s words that “Capitalism has now singled out A HANDFUL (less than one-fifths at the ‘most generous’ and liberal calculation) of exceptionally rich and powerful states which plunder the whole world simply by ‘clipping coupons.’” (V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism)

Cde. Edwards divides the imperial metropoles into two types: those with semi-colonies physically present within them (like the United States) and those who have no internal semi-colonies. She convincingly, correctly, maintains that Social Democratic (reformist, anti-Communist, and revisionist) parties flourish in the second type of country. In the first, open, reactionary, racist terror flourishes instead. The basis for both is the material benefit, the super-wages, the suppressed prices of luxury goods, that come as a bounty of imperialist exploitation and which are shared with the imperialist’s “own” workers.

This book is a critical text. Without understanding the problem of why revolution has not yet been successful in a developed imperialist country (or even attractive), we cannot begin to assault the bastions of capitalism. Cde. Edwards’ work comports with the practical information gathered over ten years by social investigations and organizing among the staff of Unity–Struggle–Unity Press and all of its affiliates. We can confirm that Cde. Edwards’ analysis explains the reality of organizing in the imperialist centers almost precisely.

This new, second edition printed by Estuary Press, is vital to study. Unfortunately, it introduces a number of irritating formatting errors (mis-numbered end-notes, mysterious extra blank pages, bs where there should be hs, indicating the use of an OCR method) which detracts somewhat from the overall reading experience — but nevertheless, all those who would claim Marxism-Leninism in the imperial centers must read this book and other works that address this problem.

All above you dangling were your wise men. I recognized none of them personally. All I knew was from a hundred black and white photographs, all presenting unflattering, villainous angles. A couple, like yours, with faces purpled by pressure, blood massing, riots at the skin. Many more with bullet wounds, taken from executions elsewhere when the idea for this display had struck. Some were decorated with nooses properly tied, though many hung from limbs, and others still from hooks. No doubt from a nearby packing plant. Too far to have been the one your father worked. In the paper I’d read they celebrated this as the return of the Christmas tree, because the year prior that same paper said you’d banned Christmas. 

I moved closer and grabbed what was left of your leg all at once: a strong breeze had shaken you and I couldn’t take the sight. Something primal in me suppressed all disgust. You reminded me of a flag. Perhaps that was what you were meant to be, why the clothes they dressed you in were at first white. 

Remember when we last spoke? I was in your house. You brought me a tray of coffee and sugar. Your daughter listened to the radio, your son left to check the night. That was when they were calling you a despot for arresting your would-be assassins. There were daily papers scattered saying as much, your dog on the couch, a pistol empty on the cushion beside him. The moon swung by its black noose upside down over the house. Your windows had been open when I arrived, and I locked them when you went to the kitchen to fetch me a spoon. You hadn’t noticed, I think. We had dinner, rations mostly, a bag of dried peach halves for dessert, good wine you saved from our university days. We drank our inhibitions and spoke of how hard it was to govern. There was no end to your problems, and limited patience for my solutions. Eventually, I’d torn one of your many newspapers apart — this was the wine — and demanded you censor its lies. I spoke of the necessity of a Red Terror until you, my dear friend, seemed afraid. 

I swept the dried peaches to the floor with my arm. I am tired of your fooling around, I’d said. As for the rights of anyone, of fascists, tell your people they can fuck themselves. Your dog sat up and barked. Your daughter stared. The moon had dug deep bright wells in her eyes. I was shamed into silence. The dried peach halves on the floor, listening to this, in the dark they looked like…

They removed your ears. On both sides of your head there is only  hair that looks caught in the rain, wet. Any idiot can guess this brutal poetry. Retributive justice for an invented crime. Deafen the paranoiac organs of Big Brother. Finally, the snakes are free. Closer now, I see your self. Remembering what you were, piece by piece, becomes how I breathe through the stench. Once two whole wandering legs. Once ten poet’s fingers. Eyes warm as the earth. I see hanging you so low was not just symbolic — you’ve become a tree trunk for carving initials and complaints, nothing romantic. I cut the noose with a hunting knife I found in you. You nearly knock us both over. I lay you in the street. For now everyone is busy, preoccupied with a new, realer terror. Your supporters, the wretched of the earth, either shipped away to some barbed place or filled my nose with their stench. With the handkerchief you once gave me and then forgot, I massage the blood from your face. I do this slowly, while I hold your hand. You won’t be here alone. Now your favorite color, I return the cloth to your breast pocket. I kiss your swollen lips. 

Beside us, the courthouse you so loved burns, casting strange shadows on your tired flesh. If I decide that the flickering of light over your face is the ghost of a smile, I’ll cremate you in that flame, I swear. I won’t tolerate satisfaction, or personal peace. I hope your soul was worth it, it’s Hell for the rest of us. At home, my new home, some of the papers are already calling you an inspiration. All the bastard scholars who never spoke of you while you lived now eulogize you. A nation where all the rebels are losers, they’ll grant sainthood to anyone who fails this spectacularly. Now that you are dead, you are safe for them to worship. I say I’ll burn you, but my face rains on you instead. I have enough fingers to shield yours remaining wholly from the night. Your hands vanish in mine like an infant’s. I wish you’d been half the monster they said you were.

Here to talk about your freedom

But i am free

Can the man at work fire you

Yes

For any reason

Yes

Without warning

And would you lose your house

Yes

Your children starve

Have you seen this happen to others



Yes

And did their hearts survive it

When another decides

If your children will eat

Because

I do not call it freedom

And

I cannot just leave you

Because i am not free either

We have posted the video he recorded below; he wanted it to be seen. Be warned that it is extremely graphic.

The world is revolting against the imperial U.S. order and its expression in Palestine. For a long time, U.S. propagandists were able to control the narrative about U.S. funding for exploitation and murder all over the world. That is no longer the case; the democratization of media through hand-held television studios has prepared the international working class to challenge the words of the panegyrists. Even the New York Times, so recently calling for a full-throated annihilation of the Palestinian people, has been forced to reassess its connection with the zionist warmongers it employs, like Anat Schwartz, whose reporting fueled the western mediasphere’s bloodlust for an IOF operation in Gaza in the wake of October 7, 2023. The imperialists are chained to this genocide, and they’re willing to bring down the entire edifice of their “respectability” with it.

But we should also be clear that Aaron’s tragic sacrifice was informed just as much by the failures of the liberation movement in the West as it was by the imperialist genocide in Gaza. As long as capitalism persists, these wars of extermination will persist. It is our duty, as those who profess to fight for liberation, to provide a meaningful outlet for the kind of rage and desperation that led Aaron to this last, desperate act. The fact is that, despite months of protests and a growing awareness in the West of the depravity of the zionist (and U.S.) regime, there is still no meaningful domestic opposition to the genocide. The Democratic Party that currently governs the U.S. Empire has categorically refused to address the actions of its zionist client-state, and in fact has been sending munitions, money, and assistance ever since this reckless campaign of race-hate was unleashed by Netanyahu and his cabinet of monsters in Tel Aviv.

Make no mistake: although we can and should mourn Aaron Bushnell and the course of events that led up to his decision, we must not duplicate it. Horribly, his death is unlikely to move the needle in any significant fashion. The way forward is not for individual acts of tragedy, which can never compound into something large enough to topple or even threaten the order of the U.S. Empire, but rather in concerted, collective action. It has become clear that marches and solidarity chants are insufficient to stop the zionist aggression — that the U.S. political caste sees too much at risk, too much money at stake, and believes there is too much to lose with regard to its ability to project armed power into West Asia to be swayed by simple demonstrations.

We must remember that every demonstration should be a warning and a promise: give in, or else. A demonstration is not a parade, but a weapon, primed and ready. In order to be an effective weapon, it must be wielded by a self-conscious and self-knowing class that is prepared to act. Building that class-consciousness, pursuing the proper and principled aims of liberation, and ultimately organizing the working class into a cohesive political and decision-making structure — a working-class organization of organizations — is what is required.

So, we mourn Aaron. And the work continues.

NIGHT-VISION – Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain, by Butch Lee and Red Rover first circulated in the activist underground thirty years ago. Despite presenting a scathing premonition of how capitalism and neo-colonialism would function in the 21st century — a vision that has only become more accurate since its publication — it remains obscure. The text has been relegated to a peculiar limbo. Its content is much harsher and more discomforting than the cultural criticism that resonates in liberal-academic circles, yet NIGHT-VISION also seems fairly unknown among its intended audience of queer-feminist Marxists, Maoists, and anarchists. In the only other review this author could easily locate, one written 13 years ago, J. Moufawad Paul argues that Marxists may disparage the text’s deviations from orthodox Marxism — for instance, its authors ascribe rationality to the anarchy of production and have an anarchistic enthusiasm for “autonomous struggles in the midst of chaos.” But while the text contains some un-Marxist conclusions and unwieldy notions, these are reasons to read NIGHT-VISION, rather than dismiss it. After all, for the immortal science to deserve its status, it should endure this kind of cage rattling.

NIGHT-VISION contains compelling analyses of gender, nationality, and race, and how these have created different classes and new class struggles beyond those typically described in Marxist texts. Even if some of what Lee and Rover have concocted is dubious, it remains worthy of interrogation. Their perspective, and fiery rhetoric, are a welcome change from the mire of discourse on these subjects found both online and in physical organizing spaces. 

Lee and Rover bake race, gender, nationality, etc. into a modern class structure, developing the idea that oppression forges only discrete classes, and that other identities are “class in drag.” For example, instead of using the standard historical phrasing, in which colonization created Blackness, whiteness, and Indigeneity as races, the authors argue they were created as classes. They argue for a deeper reading of how race, gender, and nationality alter relationships to production. For instance, they expand upon the Sakaist notion that the white proletariat constitutes a separate class from the Black, Indigenous, and Third World proletariat. They depict how the common exploitation of previously distinct African and Indigenous peoples, who had been of separate races and nations, homogenized them into the monolithic oppressed classes of the Black Slave and the Native. Black peoples’ shared experiences as slaves and the imposition of common languages like English or French created the nation-class identity of “New Afrikan.” Similarly, the experience of being marked for extermination through genocide, the cultural genocide against their languages and customs, and the enclosure on “the res” created the Indigenous nation-class, whose role in production, according to the settlers, is to go extinct.

This is a riff, or a logical extension to what Marx and Engels describe when they articulate how economic crises in capitalism are crises of overproduction — it is no longer just commodities, productive forces, or capital itself that are overproduced, and need to be disposed of, but entire societies and classes. This is worth pondering, even if it’s counterintuitive to scientifically break down how dying out is distinct from not owning the means of production.

NIGHT-VISION draws from an extensive theoretical basis. It cites heavily from the expected canon like Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney, but also draws on criminally under-read revolutionaries and theoreticians such as Amilcar Cabral and Samir Amin. The influence of J. Sakai’s Settlers upon the text is abundantly clear. But what Lee and Rover do with these texts is extend their analysis to the furthest peripheries of society — arenas of oppression that frequently go unacknowledged, even by the strata of would-be revolutionaries, communists, etc. The authors apply the traditional Marxist lens of historical materialism to neo-colonial circumstances such as the narcotics economy, the textile sweatshops of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and the semi-slave operated semiconductor factories of Hong Kong. They emphasize, through visceral descriptions and first person accounts, the abhorrent conditions that make the Western standard of living possible. Again, their critique invokes Marx himself, in that it is, “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” 

Lee and Rover’s portrayal culminates with the assertion that neocolonialism consists of the squalorous 19th century conditions Marx described in the mines and factories of his time, magnified and permeating to the furthest corners of society, on a world scale. This sounds obvious, but they argue that some Marxists have benefited from their class position to the extent they now misunderstand key Marxist concepts, such as primitive accumulation and the basic definition of certain classes. In Capital Vol.1, Marx defined primitive accumulation as “the expropriation of immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labor of its owner” that creates the first capital, and makes capitalist relations possible.  In NIGHT-VISION, Lee and Rover contend that most readers of Marx only understand the surface equation of what Marx meant — different Europeans conquering and enslaving first each other, and then broadening their conquest “outward in ever-widening circles of colonialism, in particular to Indian and Afrikan slavery” (185) — but NIGHT-VISION’s most compelling thesis is that primitive accumulation actually began as witch hunts in the 13th century. 

This claim is a bit of a historical oddity, as the historical consensus is that witch hunts didn’t begin until early modernity, i.e. the 16th century. The discrepancy is due to the authors’ conferral of witchlike qualities to the semi-monastic Beguine and Beghard communities that existed in Western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Though similar to convents, Beguine communes were not formally part of the Church. The authors denote efforts by the Church to expropriate Beguine property and persecution of Beguine women, such as Marguerite Porete, who was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1310, as the first witch hunts. 

Lee and Rover further describe how the witch hunts took on institutional form from the 15th century onward, and were social camouflage for the genocide, economic dispossession, and proletarianization of women. Due to the decimation of available labor from centuries of war and the Black Death, European countries and churches had an economic imperative to expropriate widows and any women who resisted their own commodification and their enclosure as the primary inner labor colony.

If you think this sounds exactly like Silvia Federici’s seminal 2004 text, Caliban and The Witch, you’d be right. But while Federici’s text received academic plaudits, was widely translated, and is taught in universities, scarcely anyone’s read 1993’s NIGHT-VISION, regardless of the texts’ sameness. Now, I’m not an intellectual property respecter, or someone who thinks plagiarism is necessarily wrong — in fact, different analysts using the same scientific tools should replicate the same conclusions about history. Still, the variegated treatment of Federici and her works, compared to Lee and Rover and their works, does speak to another of NIGHT-VISION’s conclusions — that the bourgeois classes are intellectually and materially parasitic upon the proletarian classes.

This seems like an obvious and redundant observation, but Lee and Rover use the framework they establish throughout the text to distinguish different class boundaries than those identified by orthodox Marxists. They take Marx’s observation that the first proletarians in England were women, children, and alien labor from England’s first colonies in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and carry it forward to the present. English men from every social strata resisted becoming proletarian for as long as they could, and constituted the first parasitic class. Today’s proletariat are the women, children, and alien labor of the Third World. It also includes the labor of the colonized and dispossessed who live in First World countries, who are collectively called the “Fourth World.” As capitalism expanded, first through colonialism and then neo-colonialism, access to membership in the parasitic classes also expanded, first to other “white” men, then to “white” women, and so on. With time, even formerly proletarian classes, such as the white working class, acquired the capacity for parasitism. After all, although the euro-American auto worker and the South African child semi-slave who mines Vanadium for pennies a day have the same relation to production, they clearly experience different degrees of exploitation. NIGHT-VISION claims that the gulf between these workers places them in different classes. It questions what meaningful solidarity western workers can possibly extend to the practically invisible and oppressed classes of the marginalized world, when their way of life is wholly dependent upon continued exploitation.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” For these reasons, capitalism always contains the conditions for class struggle and its own inevitable demise at the hands of the oppressed. What NIGHT-VISION does best is describe the “disturbances of social conditions,” that it defines as new classes and class struggles. Its study of historic and modern conditions is riveting. It creates a compelling parallel between capitalist crises of overproduction and the capitalist overproduction of class parasites, both of which act in concert to foment capitalism’s destruction. Ironically, the fate of capitalist parasites is the same fate that colonialism and then neo-colonialism attempt to impose upon their subjects — namely, extinction.

Where the text is weakest, unfortunately, is “what is to be done” with the information it presents. Its advocacy for disunity with parasites is only decorative, evocative language for what in practice is a call for unity between oppressed peoples. A communist movement will obviously isolate and repress class parasites. Its construal of uncounted numbers of national, racial, and gendered classes, some oppressed, some parasitic, in a web of struggle, is ultimately facile. After all, “socialism means the abolition of class” — for that to be possible, oppressed classes must align along their common oppressions, and not exacerbate struggles between themselves.

Overall, NIGHT-VISION is a double-edged sword. Its depiction and indictment of neo-colonial realities, “the terrain upon which we’re fighting” is stark, necessary and unforgiving, but it doesn’t offer compelling tactics for fighting on that terrain. Its construction of class creates new questions and as many semantic obstacles as it seeks to overcome. The authors’ tendency to excerpt at length from other works — there’s a thirteen page excerpt from another Butch Lee work, The Military Strategy of Women and Children, for example — may be helpful to a reader who’s new to theory or is unfamiliar with the source material. Lee and Rover may have intended NIGHT-VISION as an accessible compendium of thought for their movement. However, I found the quotations excessive in both length and quantity. Still, NIGHT-VISION’s fiery rhetoric and observations will appeal to readers interested in decolonization and land back, queer liberation, and feminism. At the end I couldn’t help but feel reaffirmed and encouraged to re-read Marx and Fanon, whose indelible presence permeates the work, even if the authors achieved this in an unorthodox manner. Ironically, the white working class — and chauvinists like those at Midwestern Marx, who have recently been attacking the NIGHT-VISION’s theoretical tradition — would benefit immensely from reading it, but they are also the most likely to dismiss it outright.   

The great merit of the book is its faithful defense of economic planning against the resilient mold of free-market ideology — a defense that is so greatly needed as neoliberalism has, for decades, corroded what little “opposition” “left” intellectuals ever managed to muster. Unfortunately, however, the authors are not Marxists, so the book  is simultaneously undermined by their infantile politics — not to mention their occasionally cringeworthy prose. Especially in the first couple of chapters, I was left with the impression that the authors are insecure about their subject matter, remarking with belabored “self-awareness” in various places that it is “old,” “musty,” “not sexy,” and as interesting as “an airport business book.” Their self-deprecating tone, meant to ingratiate the authors with an audience they assume will be hostile to, or uninterested in, what they have to say, only insults the reader’s intelligence. Wherever they constrain themselves to discussing the operation of capitalist firms or advancements in information technology, it is my opinion that the authors achieve grace, wit, and humor. Wherever they attempt to interject their own sophomoric social and political commentary, however, the book becomes an unrewarding chore to read. Ultimately, the book’s central thesis — that economic planning not only could work, but, in many ways, is already at work, and working well — can be salvaged from this smoldering wreckage, but it must be coupled with a correct analysis of democracy and social revolution. For developing Marxists with an interest in economic planning, you are in luck. While I provide here a criticism of the text, a mysterious, sexy rogue has uploaded an abridged version of the book freed from its liberal tumors – though you should only download it if you’ve already purchased a copy of the book

The political collapse and economic liberalization of the Eastern Bloc in the late 80s and early 90s, coupled with the rise of neoliberalism throughout the West and its colonies, effectively destroyed the public’s faith in the possibility of economic planning. Left and right opportunists alike continue to join hands with bourgeois economics professors and other ideologists in denouncing Soviet central planning as a failure on the grounds that economies are too complex to plan, and that market prices are indispensable for efficient resource allocation. “New Left” academics like Richard Wolff and Slavoj Žižek, armed with the anti-Soviet intellectual tradition they’ve inherited from their fascist professors, set out on ill-fated quests to discover new “mixed economy” and “market socialist” models, yearning after these impossible “syntheses,” like the alchemists’ misguided search for the philosopher’s stone. It is in this light that People’s Republic of Walmart is so refreshing. With highly accessible style, the authors gracefully defend their thesis that the market system is building the conditions for its own replacement by a system of social planning — by socialism.

One of the book’s more novel contributions is the idea that, contrary to that commonly held cliche, planning works in practice even if it doesn’t work in theory. Setting aside hypothetical and scholastic debates about the “economic calculation problem,” the authors plant their case firmly in reality by asserting that, actually, our advanced capitalist economy has been making use of planning for almost a century. It’s true that the capitalist economy at large isn’t planned, nor could it be — the only way for separate, competing firms to engage with each other is, of course, through market mechanisms. But, within the firm itself (that economic unit so often treated as a black box by bourgeois economists), planning dominates production. Furthermore, two critical developments have come about in the era of finance-capital. The first is that monopolization reigns supreme. Wherever monopolization reaches its highest pitch, whole industries effectively begin to be internally planned, even while externally subservient to the demands of the market. Secondly, finance-capital — capital controlled by banks but employed by industrialists — becomes a mechanism for rational planning of production on the part of the financial–industrial cartels. As Lenin correctly observed over a century ago, the methods of accounting and management developed by the big capitalist banks could be converted to manage production under socialism. Hence, the socialist planned economy is already in embryo within the shell of the modern world; the technology and methods of economic planning have already been developed within the market economy — and eventually this shell must crack, and give way to the more advanced social form growing within it.

The authors provide several compelling and concrete examples of their thesis in action. First, they mention that planning is not new, and that, in fact, certain ancient economies utilized primitive forms of economic planning to great effect. Second, they refer to the public sector, primarily the military, which utilizes planned production for all sorts of things — penicillin, satellites, radios, the internet, cellphones, rockets — all these and more were products of “planned capitalist production.” Most compelling, however, is the book’s comparisons of three unequivocally private firms: Walmart, Amazon, and Sears. 

On the question of what made Soviet central planning inefficient — that is, inefficient with regards to delivering consumer goods — the authors identify data throughput as the essential bottleneck. “Old school” central planning relied on manual reporting by managers and advanced calculations had to be done, and redone, by hand. Besides requiring a small team of highly skilled bureaucrats to form plans in batches based on months or even years old information, this system was also susceptible to inaccurate reporting by managers who were frequently unwilling to report failures to meet quotas. By the time distributed communications networks arrived on the scene, the bureaucratic rot of the post-Stalin Soviet system prevented adoption of these new technologies that could have streamlined planning. Cybernetic planning, by contrast, could have distributed the collection and production of data related to supply and demand while allowing real-time coordination of production and distribution. Unfortunately, the first experiment in cybernetic planning, Chile’s revolutionary Cybersyn system, was quickly dismantled by the fascist Pinochet regime. The great irony is that the closest any efforts have come to replicating Cybersyn since then have come from that infamous capitalist super-giant: Walmart.

I said earlier that separate competing firms can only interact with one another through market mechanisms — and until quite recently, this has (mostly) been true. Essential information about production, supply, and demand has been treated as invaluable proprietary data, locked up deep within each individual firm, creating a “fog of war.” But every firm is reliant on another for its supplies. Without the means to see through this fog, each firm must do its best to predict and prepare for deviations in supply and demand, requiring storage buffers. For each link in the supply chain between raw resource extraction and retailers, the storage needed to compensate for these deviations grows exponentially larger, such that small changes to demand at the end of the supply chain create huge shocks at the front. This phenomenon is known as the bull-whip effect. Walmart, the authors explain, has devised a novel way of compensating for it: complete data transparency with its partners and cross-supply chain coordination. As the authors state: “While there are indeed financial transactions within the supply chain, resource allocation among Walmart’s vast network of global suppliers, warehouses, and retail stores… [behaves] like a single firm.” Walmart was thus able to beat its competitors in the market with superior cooperation and superior planning. Amazon, another titan of modern retailing, followed suit with its “Vendor Flex” program, which allows Amazon to co-manage production of the items it stocks and to set its own quotas based on data it collects on consumers — data which would have otherwise been unavailable to Amazon’s suppliers. This horizontal integration between production and distribution cuts out the uncertainty that normally accumulates between suppliers in the market, minimizing inventory, transportation, and logistics costs. Not altogether unlike Cybersyn, the free distribution of information along sectors of production, combined with the monumental collection of consumer data, allows for efficient planning without relying on price signals to coordinate supply and demand. The authors go into much greater detail, but the bottom line is that economic planning is already here — and it works!

The unfortunate irony, and the source of many of my criticisms, is that these authors are heirs of the same “New Left” tendency that is guilty for perpetuating this free-market revival. Consequently, the book suffers whenever it veers off course from its central topic, crashing head first like Wile E. Coyote into a painted tunnel depicting an illusory “anti-Marxist socialism.” It would be difficult to completely enumerate every error the authors make without writing a book at least as long. As far as the historical sections are concerned, the problem primarily consists in a one sided screed against “Stalinism,” in which the authors desperately beg their imagined audience not to associate them — or the concept of economic planning in general — with any of the 20th century experiments in Communism. If I had to summarize the authors’ biggest theoretical failures, two particular areas come to mind: their horrendously distorted understanding of democracy and distribution.

In the first place, they make the same mistake as the 20th century socialist Karl Kautsky, who Lenin once described as a “renegade” for taking a one-sided view of democracy, never bothering to ask, “democracy, but for which class?” That is to say, they see representational institutions in capitalist society and take for granted that the working class therefore has real, representational power within the bourgeois state. Phillips and Rozworski never seem to notice that all substantive policy decisions are made behind closed doors by the personified avatars of Capital. They therefore repudiate the necessity of revolution in establishing the proletarian democracy that would be necessary for the working class to have real power over the planning of production: “In such volatile times, it cannot be ruled out that a socialist candidate or party might soon form a government in the capitalist heartlands.” It cannot be “ruled out” (despite any positive precedent to the contrary) that a socialist candidate “might” form “a government” — what grand strategic vision! Again, the problem the authors identify is that planning already exists, but it isn’t run democratically; yet they never approach the question of proletarian democracy, and therefore the necessity of dictatorship over, and liquidation of, the exploiting class. They take for granted that the existing bourgeois constitutional republic is a suitable form so long as “our guy” is at its head. The last century unequivocally proved what happens when any socialist gets close to being elected into power in a bourgeois democracy: they are assassinated, or their new government is violently couped, or they do nothing to abolish capitalism, or the bourgeoisie side with fascists to burn the precious republic to the ground, just to keep it out of the hands of the socialists. The vision of a gradual, reformist road to socialism is a facile, utopian fantasy which can only end in failure and greater bloodshed. The successful revolutions of the last century demonstrated that we cannot suffice to take hold of the ready made state machinery. We must smash it, and make our own that will serve as the basis of power for the proletariat in its mission to end class society.

Secondly, the authors follow in the footsteps of another great colossus of revisionism, Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle attempted to abstract the question of distribution from production, as though these two were separable, independent things. That is to say, Phillips and Rozworski seem to mistake socialism itself for merely a different kind of distribution: “Inequality is, in the end, a question of unfair allocation… When we ask whether another world is possible, we are also asking: Is there an alternative method to allocate things?” They begin with the question of distribution, from which every other piece of their analysis flows downstream, as if distribution were a software plugin that could be swapped in and out of the same kind of economic hardware. To be fair, the authors pay some lip service to the question of production, but they don’t really seem to understand it. For example, they further refer to nationalization as synonymous with decommodification (“Nationalization decommodifies, but does it democratize?”), as though wage laborers producing goods for the market are not producing commodities if the industry is owned by the national bourgeoisie collectively. If only they could understand the class character of the state! Most egregiously, the authors maintain that the source of inequality under capitalism is not the extraction of surplus value from the wage laborer, but rather “disparities in the distribution of income” caused by “the market,” which is only “a method of allocation.” The solution to inequality, therefore, is only a matter of a different method of distribution. They are correct that competition in the market causes concentration of wealth by ruining other capitalists, by proletarianising their competition, but this is not the source of disparity between the workers and the capitalists.  Marx proved two urgent facts that these gentlemen miss: firstly, surplus value does not come from the circulation of commodities, nor from exchanges within the market (which are, after all, equal exchanges), it comes from production. That is to say, inequality is decidedly not a question of unfair distribution, but a question of exploitation by those with power over the means of production and subsistence. Once again, the authors pay some minor lip service to this very point, but they don’t actually understand it — it is not reflected within their thesis or analysis. Secondly, the domination of the market is contingent on the dominance of commodity production, which, in turn, is contingent on the social division of labor. The social division of labor, therefore, is the basis for generalized commodity (capitalist) production. For the authors, distribution is the whole problem, the primary issue with capitalism, and hence they are unable to really explain how socialism would be established or how income inequality would be overcome.The consequence of all these errors is a vision of socialism which is, in reality, little more than a utopian vision of a more completely, “democratically” planned capitalism. Like some kind of conservative’s parody of a socialist, these daring radicals and dissidents dare to ask, “what if the entire economy was like the NHS?” By correctly educating against these grave mistakes, we can successfully rescue economic planning from revision and reaction. This book at least demonstrates that capitalists have already prepared for us the technology to plan the economy. Once the workers have seized power and overthrown the exploiters, we need “only” to expand the domain of planning to the entire economy. Of course, we should be clear: proletarian democracy and planned production are not the only two factors necessary for socialist construction. Simultaneously, we must also abolish wage labor, the social division of labor, and commodity production, replacing production for exchange with production for use. We will not merely use computers to slightly improve distribution, calculate “shadow prices,” or replace the money-form of value with the “labor-time” form of value; we seek the abolition of value.

A little while ago, Red was given his final prognosis in the battle against cancer. He has only a few weeks left and is making his final preparations. We have to say goodbye to Red, but we aren’t saying goodbye to Red the soldier. We’re saying goodbye to Red, the gardener. We may miss his soldiering in the days to come, but it is his gardening that will have had the most profound effect on those around him and on the revolution that’s coming.

Around ten years ago Red and Lindsey, the Chairwoman of FTH, started up aid in their local community in Seattle. When COVID hit, they transitioned to a more intensive, full-throated community organizing project among the unhoused. For the first time in Seattle’s history, houseless encampments became permanent thanks to the suspension of sweeps and clearing laws. FTH and CRC are community survival programs with no precondition of adhering to Communist or even broadly leftist or progressive positions. Like all real red aid (as opposed to “red charity”), conversations about Communism and the road to revolution are never foisted upon attendees; their needs are met, by unabashed and unashamed Communists. And that’s the goal.

What is the difference between red charity, mutual aid, and red aid? Red charity is charity disguised as mass work — throwing food, clothes, whatever else at a problem without engaging with the masses or, alternately, demanding that those coming for help listen to a lecture about socialism. Mutual aid is the process of mutual — two way — exchange within a community to help meet survival needs. Exchanging labor on a collective farm, for example. But red aid is something altogether different: it is meeting the survival needs of the community while assisting in the self organizing of that same community. Giving the tools needed — mass meetings, procedures, and above all the answers to the burning questions that face the community that only Marxism can provide — while at the same time standing at the forefront of struggle.

This is what FTH and CRC provide, and what Lindsey and Red have worked to establish. As their work intensified, Red and Lindsey split up responsibilities between the “front of house,” that is, service and medicine handled by FTH, and “back of house,” that is, logistics, money, and protection, handled by CRC. Red has always worked to ensure that marginalized and oppressed individuals are placed into positions of power within both CRC and FTH — he trains, but does not command.

Red is a Taoist. As he put it, “it doesn’t make sense to expect a tree to be anything other than a tree.” For Red, it’s the revolutionaries who are the trees, the grasses, and the flowers. He cares for his cadre, learns what each member of his team is suited for, what kind of revolutionary work they naturally want to do (what kind of “tree” they are), and sets up networks of support to enable them to do that revolutionary work. He’s not a gardener of plants and flowerbeds, but a gardener of revolutionaries.

We will mourn the gardener but celebrate the garden. Over ten years, Red has helped to build a powerful engine of revolution. He has contributed to the safety and well-being of hundreds if not thousands of people served by FTH and CRC. Quietly, without drawing much attention to itself, a powerful seed of revolution is gathering strength in Seattle. That seed was watered by the Red Gardener. We may be losing Red, but his contribution to the revolution will live on — and when the revolution is victorious, those of us who knew Red will know that he forged the links in the chain of victory.

A comrade never fades away,

A comrade lives forever.

For though the body may decay,

The bond cannot be severed.

A comrade never fails to breathe;

Their voice is ours, unbroken.

Their struggle and their surety,

They live through words they’ve spoken.

A comrade’s earthly reach extends

Beyond their mortal tether.

A comrade never dies, my friends,

For struggle lasts forever.

Dremel, Requiem for Red

A comrade lives forever.

For though the body may decay,

The bond cannot be severed.

A comrade never fails to breathe;

Their voice is ours, unbroken.

Their struggle and their surety,

They live through words they’ve spoken.

A comrade’s earthly reach extends

Beyond their mortal tether.

A comrade never dies, my friends,

For struggle lasts forever.