Ian Parker - Stalinist Realism and Open Communism: Malignant Mirror or Free Association

Stalinist Realism

Mark Fisher gave us a cutting-edge analysis in 2009 of what he called capitalist realism; the ideological claim that capitalism is the only possible reality today, that there is no alternative. Marks analysis showed us that this kind of realism locks us into place in capitalism, and is suffused with fantasies about our passivity and the impossibility of radical change. Realism here is the mantra of those who want the world to stay the same, of those who want exploitation to continue as it is, of those who want to convince us to give up struggling for another world beyond capitalism.

There is an alternative, and Anti-Capitalist Resistance works alongside other revolutionary organisations here and across the world to build that alternative. Mark Fisher showed us that we need a deep analysis of the ideology of capitalist realism precisely so we can better challenge it. Understanding the world, for us revolutionaries, is intimately connected to challenge and change, to struggle and transformation. That is what socialist politics is for us.

But we also face another threat, one Mark understood well, and which this little book focuses on. There is a weird flip-side of capitalist realism that pretends to offer a way out of global capitalism but which locks us all the more tightly into exploitation and oppression. That false path, a poisonous trap for the left, is stalinist realism (a telling phrase we owe to comrade Ali); little s for stalinist here to mark it as a pervasive cultural-political phenomenon on the left. Stalinist realism is very present in the explicit politics of some groups that say they are communist and in the politics of their fellow travellers who are well-meaning but deeply mistaken.

Stalinist realism is a kind of weird malignant mirror of global capitalism; it repeats many of the most toxic aspects of capitalism while posing as an alternative. It is not an alternative. It is part of the problem. Here we explain what stalinist realism is, and why it needs to be avoided.

To understand what stalinist realism is, we will need to quickly backtrack to its origins, and show how it reflects and reinforces capitalism. Then we will look at different kinds of supposedly anti-imperialist and feminist arguments made by stalinist realist politics, arguments that seem to be progressive but are in fact deeply reactionary, betraying anti-imperialist and feminist struggles.

These arguments have consequences for organisation and struggle. Revolutionary democracy is, against the stalinist realist tradition, the basis for authentic anti-capitalist resistance. That is the basis of a real alternative, open communism.

Open communism

There are plenty of corrupt pretenders to communism that have smeared the word and turned it into exactly the kind of bureaucratic police state that the right-wing defenders of capitalism always said it would be. And capitalism benefits from this weird mirror image of capitalist un-freedom; the existence of authoritarian closed states that proclaim that they are communist or those regimes that are ruled by communist parties effectively frightens people off from demanding an alternative, from building an alternative for themselves.

We need to open the roads to communism, open communism. We want a world that is just and fair, and where we hold the earth and what we produce in common as a shared resource for all. Almost everything we are told about communism is what we do not want; ranging from the idea that it is about state control to the claim that the ruling party will take away your toothbrush.

We are wary about setting out blueprints for exactly what a communist society will look like. Apart from the time taken piddling about tinkering with this or that rule for setting up a new society in a completely abstract way an activity for nitpickers that turns communism from a practical accomplishment into some kind of idea in the clouds any blueprint drawn up now will simply reflect present-day life and limitations of living under capitalism now.

We do not know how things will unfold, from where, and when, and that means communism is much more about a process than an endpoint. And, lets face it, with the climate crisis condemning the globe to a fiery hell, it is possible we will not get to that endpoint at all. What counts is what we do now, how we struggle and what we build.

Thats why we show in this little book why freedom is essential to communism, and that includes the kinds of limited freedom that were stolen from us when capitalism was developed as a political-economic system, developed on the basis of the enclosure of land and control of our creative abilities. That freedom entails opening up to an international dimension of struggle, connecting with the struggles of all of the oppressed and valuing plurality of struggles, plurality of perspectives.

Against closed bureaucratic fake-communism the heritage of tragic failed revolutions and counterrevolutions we open communism to a transition that anticipates the forms of life we want in the forms of struggle we engage in now. We should not as some of the hard-faced old left imagine we should do bad things now as means to the supposed good ends. That is a bankrupt dead-end. Instead, we realise our visions of communism now in the very process of making the transition. Making small significant steps is not the opposite of revolution, but the prerequisite for it as we open communism now.