2.

Communism or
capitalism?

According to popular opinion, communism is a doctrine first elaborated in the 19th century by celebrated Siamese twins Karl Marx and F. Engels, to be perfected a little later by Lenin, founder of the Soviet state. It’d be applied to more or less fanfare in a certain number of countries: the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba… It’s in this context that people debate whether the regimes of Yugoslavia or Algeria are socialist, capitalist, or mixed. You can rest assured—or be sorry—that we won’t be singing the praises of this socialism here or that communism there. We don’t think the moon’s made of green cheese; we don’t mistake the desolate gray of Eastern Europe, or the delirium of the personality cult in China, for humanity’s radiant future.

Sliced bread

Communism was founded neither by Marx, nor by Engels, nor by Ramses the Great. There might be a brilliant inventor behind sliced bread or gunpowder; there isn’t one behind communism, any more than there was behind capitalism. Social movements aren’t a matter of invention.

Engels, then Marx, met with a movement already well aware of its own existence. They never claimed to have invented either the thing or the word. They didn’t write much on communist society itself. They helped communism, in movement and theory, to emerge from the mists of religion, rationalism, utopianism. They spurred proletarians to stop relying on the plans of one or another reformer or the revelations of one or another visionary.

True revolutionaries don’t fetishize the ideas of Marx and Engels. They know that the ideas were the products of a particular era and that they have their limitations. Both men evolved; both sometimes contradicted themselves. It could be argued that everything’s to be found in the work of Marx. Still, it has to be possible to sort out!

We don’t claim to be Marxists. But to those who do claim to be Marxists, we deny the right to appropriate and falsify the thoughts of their heroes.

The proof that great men are powerless to the movement of history is given us in the sordid way that the works of Marx and Engels have been distorted in order to be used against communism.

There are individuals more gifted and more far-sighted than the bulk of their peers. Class society cultivates these differences. They have repercussions within the communist movement. We aren’t engaging in discussion in order to determine whether it’s the leaders or the people who make history. We’re saying that the work of Marx—like that of Fourier, or Bordiga, or whatever other spokesperson for communism—surpasses the point of view of the mere individual. Communism doesn’t deny differences in ability, nor reduce its theorists to mere loudspeakers for the masses; to the contrary, it is the fierce and constant enemy of careerism and celebrity.

Communism is neither an ideology nor a doctrine. Just as there are communist acts, there are also communist words, texts, theory—but the action isn’t the application of the idea. The theory isn’t a pre-established plan for a struggle, or a society, most suitable for massaging into reality. Communism is not an ideal.

The countries that proclaim themselves Marxist-Leninist aren’t areas where the principles of communism have been poorly applied, for one reason or another. They are capitalist countries. Their regimes present some idiosyncratic characteristics, but they’re just as capitalist as any liberal regime. You could even say that countries like Poland or East Germany are much more capitalist than many less-industrialized countries of the “free world.” In these “communist” countries, they combat certain natural tendencies of capital; this is done for the sake of the general development of capitalism and is in no way a defining feature.

There’s nothing communist about the command economy, or collective ownership of the means of production, or proletarian ideology. These are aspects of capitalism that were intensified in those countries. All the fundamental characteristics of the system and all the logic of capital accumulation, re-baptized as “socialist accumulation,” do very well there.

The capitalist mode of production

To see socialism or communism in Marxist-Leninist regimes is to misunderstand their reality; above all, it demonstrates an ignorance of what capitalism is.

People think that it’s based on the power of a very specific class, the bourgeoisie; on the private ownership of the means of production; on the frantic pursuit of profit. Not one of these features is fundamental.

The bourgeoisie is heir to the archaic mercantile class. After ages of playing a powerful but strictly delimited role within agriculturally-based societies, over the course of the European Middle Ages the mercantile bourgeoisie began to control not only mere commodities but also the instruments of production. Among these was human labor power, which it transformed into a commodity via wage labor. This is the origin of capitalism.

The bourgeoisie came to power the moment it became the dominant class, thanks to the power of the economic and industrial forces that sustain it—forces that rendered the old methods of production obsolete. But it can’t do anything but submit to the laws of its own economy. The owner of capital, it must obey this force that drags it along, shoves it around, and sometimes drives it to bankruptcy.

The individual and the business have some room to maneuver, but neither can swim against the current for long.

No class, in times past, has ever been able to satisfy all of its whims by using the ostensible forces at its disposal. Even the most undisputed tyrant can only persist by circumventing the narrow limits of his actual sovereignty. It’s a mistake to seek to explain social phenomena in terms of power. This goes even more for capitalism than it does for the systems that preceded it.

The class of capital’s administrators has seen itself endlessly reshaped by the very effects of capital. What does the wealthy merchant of the Middle Ages have in common with the modern manager? Their motivations and their tastes are different. This is necessary to their ability to fulfill the same function at two different moments in the development of capital. The class of feudal lords situated itself through tradition and heredity. This no longer applies for a bourgeoisie that unmakes and remakes itself by way of achievement, marriage, and bankruptcy.

The relations that bind the slave and the master, the serf and the lord, are personal relations. The modern proletarian, on the contrary, is bound less to a boss than to a system. What shackles him isn’t a personal allegiance or some specific coercion; it’s precisely the need to survive, the tyranny of his own needs. The proletarian, uprooted from his feudal lands and alienated from the means of production, has no recourse but to go and prostitute himself. He’s free, marvelously free. If it should strike his fancy, he could even refuse to go sell himself and so starve to death.

A bourgeois or a politician can go bankrupt on a personal level. In Russia and China, it was a whole sect of the international bourgeois class that was left high and dry. It saw itself replaced by a bureaucracy. Don’t mistake the latter as some radically different class! A “communist” banker or captain of industry bears more resemblance to his capitalist enemy than either does to his “ancestor”—not of the 15th or 16th century, but of 50 years ago.

If capitalism, be it Western or Eastern, can’t be explained by the power of the bourgeoisie, communism can even less be reduced to the power of the proletariat. Its advent signifies the self-destruction of this class.

Private property

The private ownership of the means of production isn’t a constitutive characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. It falls within the legal sphere. In the East, it subsists in the peasantry’s patches of land. In the West, it’s being eroded by public property.

The state is often the owner of large industrial outfits. The postal services and the railroads, in being nationalized, haven’t shed their capitalist natures. F. Engels saw, in this state tendency to assume ownership of the productive forces, a general evolution that would relegate private capitalism to antiques shops.1

The development of modern capitalism is increasingly tending to disassociate the ownership from the management of the productive forces. Even bosses—not only of nationalized companies but also of sprawling private enterprises—don’t own the capital they control; if they do, they own a tiny fraction of it. The capital needs of industrial giants far exceed what could be furnished by a personal or family fortune. These entities operate on the money furnished by a functionally impotent mass of petty shareholders and individual savings accounts.

The condition of Eastern Europe must be understood in accordance with this general evolution of capital.

Profit

The capitalist is supposed to be propelled by the quest for maximum profit. The expression “maximum profit” doesn’t mean much. A business owner can try driving men and machines at full capacity for one day, or for a week, or even for a whole month, if he’s sure of finding a market. But he runs the risk of immediate regret, having exhausted all his capital. A failure of this kind took place in China with the “Great Leap Forward.” Neither the rate of economic growth nor the scale of generated profits, and thus the determination of shareholder and administrator income, are freely decided by all-powerful capitalists.

Making money—that’s what propels the capitalist, whether it be to hoard or to invest. If he fails to do so, out of laziness, out of generosity, or because it’s no longer objectively feasible, his enterprise will be eliminated. This also plays out for the bureaucrat, mingled with the fear of administrative sanctions. Neither in the USSR nor in China do they proclaim that profit has disappeared. On the contrary, they seek profit for the good of the people, for the development of communism. It’s become an instrument of economic measure, in the service of the planned economy!

As Marx has shown, capitalist development cannot be explained by the profit motive in either the East or the West. It’s the opposite that’s true. The ideas of profit and property rent don’t explain the workings of the system. They’re only the categories through which the ruling classes become aware of economic necessities and are driven to act.

Unlike the left-wing humanists who see, or pretend to see, profit as their great enemy, revolutionaries don’t allow themselves such delusions. We don’t reproach the system for its immorality. We don’t cling to archaic fields that are no longer profitable.

Profit will disappear with the revolution. And without delay! But until then, it has a role to play in protecting workers, to a certain degree. It imposes limits on the tyranny of bosses. It obliges them to steward their human assets. If it were possible to abolish profit while preserving capital, the average business would turn into a concentration camp and society would slide into utmost barbarism. Nazism isn’t an accident of history. It’s the unleashing of forces that continue to lurk in the slums of capital’s civilization. Profit sets some limits on the authoritarianism, the will to dominate and crush, engendered by an inhuman system.

So go after profit! But you also have to go after every part of a society in which human life itself has become a commodity.

Wage labor and industrialization

The capitalist mode of production is built on two solid pillars distinguishing it from the modes of productions that preceded it.

The first of these pillars is wage labor. There have always been men who rent out their charms, their political attachments, their military abilities, and even their labor power. But all this remained marginal in social systems composed of small groups, among whom money and commodities didn’t circulate much. The development of capitalism signified wage labor’s true introduction to the field of production. It would turn it into the general form of exploitation.

The second pillar is industrialization, or more broadly, a mutation in man’s relationship with nature and his own activity. Man is no longer content to scratch at the soil to eke out his subsistence. From here on out, he undertakes to systematically transform nature on a constantly increasing scale. Capitalism is an uninterrupted revolution in the methods of production. It’s the progress of science and reason in the face of fatalism and obscurantism. It’s the movement that succeeds the stagnation of agrarian societies.

Communism won’t turn the ship around. The end of wage labor doesn’t mean a return to slavery or serfdom. Overcoming the process of the “conquest of nature,” and of the industrial organization of labor, doesn’t mean returning to the stagnation of the past. Communism will abandon the aggressive and chaotic nature of capital’s undertakings. Its goal isn’t to destroy, compartmentalize, and subjugate, but to act comprehensively on the world so as to humanize it, so as to render it habitable. Beyond industry, it will reconcile the necessary and the pleasant. It will rediscover, on a higher level, the lost familiarity that once united the human being with his environment.

Capitalism didn’t come into bloom one fine morning because people suddenly realized how efficient it was. It isn’t some triumph of reason. It imposed itself on the fly, through social convulsions that were often cruel and irrational. It provoked mutinous reactions. It had to retreat before pressing onward. It fished its wage laborers out of the masses of peasants that it had previously driven from their lands and reduced to the status of beggars.

The movement of capital has a dual aspect. On the one hand, it’s the development of human and material productive forces, and therefore of use value and of utility. On the other, it’s the development of exchange value. The commodity has always presented these two faces. Capital remains commodity, but it’s moreover a value that unceasingly seeks to inflate itself.

Capital has long been emerging from beneath the commodity. The merchant could, through his ingenuity or his craftiness, maintain and turn over an ever-growing hoard of goods. The moneylender could do the same, troubling himself only with money. But these primitive forms of capital couldn’t go on indefinitely. Value remained parasitic, not able to create the means necessary to its own accumulation. It was only by taking hold of and fixing an ever-growing value on the means of production that capital has really been able to flourish. A vampire that feeds on value, which is to say human labor, it needs to cultivate mechanization and productivity in order to achieve its aims. For capital, these are only means. For us, they’re what matter most in the end. These technological developments often take nasty forms—unemployment, deadly weapons, the ravaging of nature­—but they’ll make it possible to revolutionize human activity, and to emerge from the barbaric era of class society.

Communism doesn’t cut down capital so as to rediscover the original commodity. Market exchange is a link in a progression, but it’s a link between antagonistic parties. It’ll disappear without anyone having to revert to barter, that primitive form of exchange. Humanity will no longer be divided into opposing groups and enterprises. It’ll organize itself to convert and make use of its shared heritage, to distribute duties and pleasures. The logic of sharing will replace the logic of exchange:

1. Money will cease to exist. It isn’t a neutral instrument of measurement. It’s the commodity in which all other commodities are reflected.
2. Gold, silver, and diamonds will no longer have any value beyond what’s borne by their specific utility. As per Lenin’s wish, it’ll become possible to reserve gold for the construction of public urinals.

The state and capitalism

In the “communist” camp, money continues to circulate in tranquility. Division by borders, and within these borders the division of the economy into separate enterprises, is doing extremely well.

The State’s role in the economy, which is based legally on the public ownership of enterprises, is explained by the nature of capitalism.

The State and the commodity are old friends. Merchants want society to be unified, thieves to be hunted down, and currency to be guaranteed. The State and the bureaucracy find, in the circulation of goods and people, the means to free themselves from the agrarian world.

The modern State, monarchical or republican, is the product of capital’s dissolution of feudal structures. In its capacity as the representative of the public interest, it sets itself against the individual’s interest. It is necessary to capital because it helps to overcome the contradictions and oppositions that the latter can’t help but provoke.

The monarchy and the bourgeois, despite difficult moments, supported each other in the face of the feudality. Political consolidation was necessary to the development of commercial and industrial enterprises. Wealth and resources allowed for the power of the State to become stronger and more autonomous. Often, the State even directly intervened to allocate or consolidate the capital necessary for one branch of industry or another. It developed the legal arsenal necessary to the development of a free workforce. It liquidated the customs and constraints of old. By the time the bourgeoisie made its first open appearance on the political scene, it had long since been a dominant force, and the monarchical State had long since come under its service.

In Russia and Japan, countries that were thrown onto the international stage in a state of under-industrialization, it was the State itself that initiated and organized the development of capitalism. It did so to preserve the grounds of its own power, to furnish itself with modern arms. In conscripting capital, it was only bowing to the latter’s superiority. The monarchy was embarking on a process that would ultimately end in its own destruction. The conditions necessary to this transplantation weren’t present everywhere. If it succeeded in Japan, it’s because the state was already autonomous and trade mature. China initially ran aground, and so did the majority of the other precapitalist countries.

The State often has to intervene in order to correct capital, which enjoys demonstrating its own caprice and prefers to settle more in one place than another. Bureaucratic regimes only elevate this tendency to previously unknown heights.

Does Eastern capitalism allow for growth that’s more harmonious or rational than Western capitalism? The question doesn’t make much sense. If this has happened, it’s thanks to the failings of traditional capitalism. If this traditional capitalism is now being reimported to Moscow or Leningrad, it’s because of the failings of Eastern capitalism.

Where the bourgeoisie developed slowly by means of the economy, the bureaucracy won political power by relying on the support of specific social forces, like the proletariat and the peasantry. It’s still no less the product of international capital’s disintegration of traditional society. The bureaucracy had no choice. It wasn’t able to establish socialism or communism like it claimed it could. It wasn’t able to restore traditional capitalism and make it fertile. This was because of its social foundations and their need of capital. By trial and error, the bureaucracy found a path which was in keeping with its nature and allowed it to accumulate industrial capital at the expense of the peasantry.

The bureaucracy is a unifying force that enabled the authoritarian transfer of wealth from one sector of society to another. It alters the natural development of capital for the sake of its own goals of power and permanence. But capital isn’t some neutral force that can be applied in any direction. The bureaucracy plans; it dominates. But what does it plan, what does it dominate? The accumulation of capital. It diminishes the free market; it combats an ever-resurgent black market. This is proof, not of its anticapitalism, but of the fact that capital’s natural basis is alive and well. What would we say of the gardener who, because he has to pull out weeds, claims that the plants he cultivates are no longer vegetables!

The western States themselves have been led to intervene more and more directly in the interplay of economic forces. They need to have social policy and they need busy themselves with planning. Bureaucratization isn’t a phenomenon specific to the countries of Eastern Europe. Democratic and fascist States are just as affected by it as they are by big private firms. It’s the product of and dismal remedy for society’s increasing atomization.

In one sense, it’s inaccurate to speak of bureaucratic capitalism or State capitalism in Eastern Europe. All modern capitalisms are bureaucratic and state-run.

Though the owner of all industry, the State doesn’t hold absolute control. Real power and legal power aren’t the same thing.

With liberal capitalism, the State can attack one major corporation or another by relying on the support of popular, military, or even bourgeois forces. It is the power. This doesn’t allow it, however, to rise above economic laws. It wants to stand against the power of monopolies, but it can’t return to the small businesses of the past.

With Eastern capitalism, the bureaucratic state cannot abolish commercial categories or competition between businesses, regardless of its thirst for control. As long as there are separate businesses, they’ll compete, even if prices are controlled.

This lack of unity isn’t limited to the economic sphere. The bureaucracy itself is ceaselessly divided by factional struggles and interpersonal conflicts. In the absence of unity, the image of unity must be maintained. The enemy is the anti-party, not the party rival next door.

What the bureaucracy gains in efficiency for the economy, it loses again. The lie—the loss of reality—glut the social body. Covert struggles replace open competition.

Though capable of initiating a burst of economic development under thankless conditions, the bureaucracy is in thrall to the technological lead of liberal societies.

Recycling

What interest would capitalists have in calling themselves communists? Capitalists don’t like being called capitalists, as a general rule!

This naming convention has a specific origin tied to the Russian Revolution. To call yourself a communist was to claim a devotion to the working class rather than admitting to exploiting it. It can grant a humane sensibility—the construction of communism— to the inhuman development of the system. Elsewhere, they dangle projects of a “new frontier” or a “new society” before the masses!

When capital proclaims itself communist, when it recycles Marx’s thoughts in order to disseminate them to the intellectuals in its universities, or to stupefy the workers in its factories, it only apes a movement that, elsewhere, is actually being realized. Capital doesn’t create; it recycles. It feeds on the passion and initiative of proletarians, which is to say that it feeds on communism.

You can’t understand much about communism if you don’t understand the capitalist nature of the countries of Eastern Europe. Revolutionary struggle can’t spare Stalinism, which is a fundamentally anti-communist system and ideology. The fact that it has strongholds in the very heart of the working class must not soften us; on the contrary, it should spur us against compromise.

It’s a great boon for Stalinism that nobody criticizes it as a capitalist system. Some revolutionaries, especially anarchists, have recognized it as communist—provided that they could append “authoritarian” to the term. Behold­ the monster, authority! By way of explanation, we’ll look to the character of Karl Marx.

The Trotskyists, following their leader, that unhappy adversary of Stalin, have elaborated interpretations as complicated as they are moronic. A socialist base and a capitalist structure can coexist, at least in the USSR.2 As for other countries­, they remain under discussion. In any case, they never understood anything about communism. No more than Trotsky, who saw in compulsory labor a communist principle.3 They aren’t revolutionaries; Trotsky himself was. But he was never anything but a bourgeois revolutionary and unhappy bureaucrat. Let’s leave this little clique to its intellectualism, its Byzantine quarrels, and its ridiculous cult of organization.

The Maoists, those “mystico-Stalinists,” reduce the whole matter to a question of politics and morality. The USSR has become social-imperialist, maybe even properly capitalist. Happily, China and Albania, under the wise proletarian leadership of Mao, Enver Hoxha, and Bibi Fricotin,4 haven’t been contaminated. Communism­: profit and politics, made to serve the people!

As communist ideas spread to fulfill the needs of a proletariat once again becoming revolutionary, even in the USSR and China, these sects will appear more and more eccentric! They try to restrict the role of the revolution to the political stage. They’re at the vanguard, but the vanguard of capital. Because during periods of revolution, it’s all of these political clowns who’ll try to avoid being cast out by putting on revolutionary airs.

It’s become a tradition that revolution should be opposed in the name of revolution. Militants who’ve gone astray among the Stalinists and the leftists will rejoin the true communist party.

Some people, less blind, recognized the division of social classes within Eastern capitalism. Unfortunately, they also thought they recognized in it a new and improved mode of production. This did great honor to Stalin and company.

Savages

We see nothing communist in the regimes that claim to be so. By contrast, we do see it where it’s not usually ascribed. Primitive societies—driven back by “civilization,” subsisting in lands that are barren or hard to access—are communist, though their members live off of hunting and gathering or rudimentary agriculture. Thus, the USSR isn’t communist, but the United States of America was, just a few centuries ago!

We don’t intend to return humanity to this stage. It’d be very difficult, in any case, because that state of affairs requires a very low population density. It is important, however, to restore primitive and prehistoric humanity.

The Indian was happier and, in a certain sense, more civilized, than the modern American citizen. The caveman didn’t die of hunger. It’s today that hundreds of millions of humans have empty stomachs. The primitive, as M. Salhins has shown, lives in abundance.5 He’s rich, not because he’s accumulated riches, but because he lives as he sees fit. His apparent poverty, his destitution, arouses pity in the Western traveler who sometimes paradoxically marvels at his good health before infecting him with the pox. Primitives possess practically nothing, but for those who live off of the hunt and the harvest, this is no embarrassment. Their destitution allows them to move freely and make the most of nature’s riches. Their security is based not in savings but in their knowledge and their ability to make use of what their environment provides. They spend less time earning their living than do the civilized. Their “productive” activity has nothing to do with the ennui that emanates from the office and the factory. Lucky Yir-Yoront of Australia, who have one word for both work and for play!6

There’s a profound difference between the communism of the past and the communism to come. On the one hand, there’s a society that makes use of its environment, knowing well how to adapt to it; on the other, there’s a society based on the continuous and profound transformation of that same environment. The period of class societies between these two communisms will seem, with a little hindsight, a painful but relatively short stage in human history. Thin consolation for those still immersed in it!

Marx and Engels

Marx and Engels strove to understand the development of capitalist society. They were little concerned with depicting the world of the future—an undertaking that had monopolized the efforts of the utopian socialists. But you can’t completely dissociate the critique of capitalism from the assertion of communism. A real understanding of the historical roles of money and the state can only arise from the prospect of their disappearance.

If Marx and Engels had little to say about communist society, it’s doubtless not just because its distance made it harder to grasp, but because paradoxically, it was more present in the revolutionary imagination. When they spoke of the abolition of wage labor in The Communist Manifesto, they were well understood by the people that they were reiterating. Today, it’s more difficult to picture a world rid of the state and the commodity because they’ve become omnipresent. But having become omnipresent, they’ve also lost their historical necessity. Before they become entirely useless, before what they assert have become truisms, theoretical efforts need to take the reins from spontaneous consciousness.

Marx and Engels may have been outstripped by one Fourier7 in grasping the nature of communism as a liberation and harmonization of the emotions. Nonetheless, the latter never managed to leave wage labor behind; among other things, he suggests that doctors should no longer be paid in relation to patients and their illnesses, but rather according to the state of the entire community’s health.8

Marx and Engels express themselves clearly enough, however, that they shouldn’t be held liable for the bureaucracy and financial policies of “communist” countries. According to Marx, money immediately disappears upon the advent of communism, and producers stop trading their products. Engels speaks of the disappearance of commodity production with the advent of socialism. And don’t talk to us about youthful mistakes, as a whole rabble of Marxologists have gotten in the habit of doing. We’re referring to the Critique of the Gotha Program and Anti-Dühring.

All kinds of Stalinists will talk about dross in the work of the masters. They’ll make a song and dance of publicizing that they’re Marxists, not dogmatists. According to them, money, capital, and the State have all shed their bourgeois natures in order to become proletarian. The most daring go as far as to say that, once communism is established, we might be able to rid ourselves of all those odds and ends. For the others, communism is simply a society in which the standard of living will be very, very high. In any case, communism is lost in the clouds, and the ladder leading there is made up of a profusion of rungs constituting as many transitional stages.

It’s correct that they’re establishing communism in Eastern Europe. They’re establishing it no better nor more thoughtfully than they have anywhere else. A revolution will be necessary to bring that about.

This notion of establishing communism­ by means of economic and social instruments is characteristically bourgeois. It pictures the thing like the production of a manufactured good. It sees society as a vast factory. It believes that the whole functions like the part. It’s all a matter of will, of planning, of the political line…

The mistake these Stalinists make along the way has repercussions on the outcome. It isn’t a matter of getting rid of the business economy but of turning the economy into one singular business; the waste embodied by the existence of a police force will go away; the strengthening of moral sensibilities, through “communist” education, will be enough to get rid of theft and subversion!

Doubtless, the best solution is the one proposed by Joseph Stalin himself. Failing to transform things, transform the words instead. Why would you think that people who receive a wage are wage laborers, pontificates the little father of the people, seeing how through the State, they own the companies that employ them? You cannot be your own wage laborer! Wage labor is therefore abolished in the Soviet Union. If you are under the impression that you receive a paycheck, if you are afraid of being fired, this is because you are totally delusional. Happily, our socialist fatherland boasts re-education centers and psychiatric hospitals!

Stalin concedes that commodity production and division into enterprises still exist, but that this cannot be a matter of capitalism, because under capitalism, the means of production are owned by individuals. Everything, in fact, boils down to questions of legal definition. It’s enough that a state proclaim itself communist for it to be so.

As Stalin explained this all to us in The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, those who have since pored over the issue have contributed nothing new.

You can see Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro as courageous freedom fighters, skillful statesmen. You can reckon that the Chinese have more to eat than do the Indians, and fewer political freedoms than do the Japanese. But all of that still lies within the bounds of capitalism.