In the course of his regular reflections on Communism while walking, working out, commuting et cetera, the present writer has identified one aspect of what has bothered him for so long about the attitude of those living in Late Capitalism towards the countries of Existing Socialism of the last century. While he is by no means interested in reviving general enthusiasm for these at times quite odd and at times quite brutal experiments, it is of the highest importance to criticise them for what they did wrong, praise them for what they did right, and celebrate generally the attempt to create a new world, within which New Socialist Woman and Man might flourish. 

Macdara’s attitude follows the great Aijaz Ahmad, writing in 1992, who emphasises the distortions introduced by external pressures on regimes that were already flawed. His words must be quoted directly. In the post-war period, he writes, Imperialism and the globalised economy allowed Capital

to command enormous power to condemn every country which even attempted to introduce socialism to a perpetual war economy under conditions of acute scarcity and low levels of social development, with no prior experience of even a bourgeois democracy, let alone a socialist one. 

This means that the “worst potentialities of Stalinist bureaucratism […] had the maximum chance of realization”.

There simply was no line that could be clearly drawn between what was a consequence of unbearable external pressure and what was simply inherent in the very mode of the command economy which the Stalin regime first introduced[.]

But none of these countries is ever judged on its economic performance in relation to its own past, its inherited environment, its regional location […] What matters is that Vietnam has failed utterly to become a Singapore, China simply is not Japan or California, Cuba is not Miami.

In Viet Nam, for example,

Literal devastation of the land meant that agricultural production was barely enough to feed the surviving population, but lack of development resources for a country reduced to rubble meant also that no dramatic improvement in production was possible. […] Thus it was that Vietnam, the great victor of anti-imperialist war, became the showcase not of socialism but of the impossibility of building socialism.

So the richest country in the world was successful in proving the failure of socialism by leaving the land of Viet Nam so damaged that it could not grow sufficient food for the desperate people living upon it.

What Macdara finds so valuable in Ahmad’s account is that it refers to a speculative timeline—never to be explored in detail, since counterfactual history is not the preserve of the serious person—an alternative world, in which the socialist countries were not obliged to fight the capitalist powers and moved instead to address their internal contradictions. The ethical force of this possibility, this nonexisting place, can be felt, it must be felt by any leftist: part of what exercises Ahmad is the Left’s acceptance of the failure of socialism, and therefore of the colonisation by Capital not just of History, Politics, the Mind, but also of the last thing anyone must have available to them, their own Imagination.