Victor Wallis’s Socialist Practice and revolutionary socialism’s burden of proof
George Fish
Platypus Review 183 | February 2026
Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
VICTOR WALLIS, professor in the Liberal Arts Department at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, is one of the world’s leading academic authorities and exponents of revolutionary socialism. He further shares this expertise in an editorial capacity with two leading journals of the revolutionary socialist Left, the Monthly Review and the academic journal Socialism and Democracy. (Self-disclosure: I’ve known Wallis vaguely since 1980, when he was a professor of political science at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis and I was an early-30s Leftist and aspiring writer. However, I never took a course from him, and we were not close friends. Indeed, our personal relationship was sometimes testy, alternating between his approving of me for my political views, and at other times sharply dissociating himself from me for expressing Left political and social views he disapproved of. Once, he even went so far as to completely cut off the funding he’d provided for me because of such a disagreement, even though he knew I depended on his money! However, despite all this, I’ve never considered him a personal enemy, and do not to this day.) Author of many books and articles on the subject, as well as on socialist ecology, two fields he sees as interrelated, Wallis’s book Socialist Practice stands out as a cogent “lawyer’s brief” for revolutionary socialism, which Wallis sees as imperative. For Wallis, it’s an either/or: either socialist revolution to once and for all abolish capitalism, or impending disaster due to environmental degradation and climate change. Unfortunately for Wallis, however, this already presents a conundrum, as he admits, appropriately, that the level of revolutionary socialist consciousness today, especially in the United States (the implicit focus of his revolutionary socialist impulse, supposedly, though not stated, because it’s the most advanced, most powerful capitalist economy and society in the world), is certainly not high enough or extensive enough to carry out such a revolution, and won’t be for quite some time — at least a whole generation or two. In the meantime, the world will just continue to ecologically degrade, perhaps past the tipping point! (The current crisis of Trumpism in the U.S. presently puts this on hold, of course, as fighting and defeating Trumpism is the Left’s biggest priority as I write in early September 2025.)
For Wallis, who sees capitalism in strictly Manichean terms, as an absolute evil, it’s revolution or nothing. Reforms are of no avail, will never ever go far enough, and he completely rejects social democracy for having nothing of a lasting nature to commend itself, writing acerbically that the “alternative [to not opposing capitalism totally] is to reinforce the basic assumptions of anticommunism, which, in their social democratic variant, call for the decomposition of any coherent vision of social transformation and its replacement by a hodgepodge of socialist proposals grafted onto a presumably indestructible capitalist framework” (40–41).
As such a “lawyer’s brief” for revolutionary socialism and the complete eradication of capitalism, Wallis’s Socialist Practice is a most able one. That is why it is worth critiquing in detail. My critique of Socialist Practice is a democratic socialist, i.e., social-democratic, one, following from Michael Harrington’s “Left wing of the feasible,” and is devoted to two propositions: (1) the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism in the United States or any advanced capitalist country is unrealistic; and (2) that social-democratic “mere reformism,” far from exhausting itself, can still articulate and put into practice a meaningful program that, while not actually overthrowing capitalism, tames it and cuts off its most execrable failures and excesses, and can make life better, both materially and psychologically, for millions of ordinary people. It can thus be a win-win proposition. I write this without any personal animus against Professor Wallis generally, even though he accused me of “trashing” (his word) Socialist Practice. I did no such nefarious deed; as far as it goes in making the case for revolutionary socialism, it is exceptionally able and complete. The problem lies rather in revolutionary socialism itself. It is not “feasible,” Left-wing or otherwise. Victor Wallis plays his revolutionary socialist cards well; unfortunately, he has a busted hand, as I hope to show below.
Wallis’s book is 237 pages of text, divided into two parts, “Part I: Issues in Applied Marxist Theory,” from which all my quotes from Wallis’s text are taken; and “Part II: Social Movements and Political Leadership,” where I express solidarity with Victor Wallis and the issues of solidarity and shared appreciation on which we could work together as comrades, if he’s willing. There’s much more in it than just a defense of, and advocacy for, revolutionary socialism. However, this essay will confine itself solely to analyzing Wallis’s case for revolutionary socialism (which is, essentially, it existed once, wasn’t really all that bad, and needs to come again), and why I advance the “social-democratic variant” he’s so dismissive of. But, while this essay does contain elements of a review of Wallis’s book, it is not a book review as such.
So, Victor Wallis is for the total revolutionary overthrow of capitalism! But so have been Marxists and socialists now for over two centuries, all the way back to the days of the French Revolution and the early utopian socialists. Wallis is in distinguished company. But for a start, Professor Wallis leaves unanswered the question: just how is this transformative socialist revolution, especially in the U.S., to come about? Through Bolshevik-style urban insurrections in the Left-leaning East and West Coast urban enclaves, leaving a vast “L-shaped wasteland” (my term for the primarily-rural Red States of the Deep South, the Midwest, and the non-coastal West) of extensive geographical area for the counterrevolution to regroup, which also happened in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, necessitating the bloody Russian Civil War? Or a civil war of military conquest generally, as in the American Civil War or the Chinese Communists’ war against the Japanese and the Kuomintang? Or a massive general strike that paralyzes society and the economy, on the order of the students’ and workers’ strike in France, 1968, only this time with the ruling powers-that-be abdicating political power rather than merely regrouping and returning? Such scenarios are not frivolous!
Also left unanswered is the nature of what Brezhnev called “already existing socialism,” i.e., the regimes of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe — to which must be added Maoist China, even though China maintained that the USSR had already “restored capitalism”; and the regimes of Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba, all of which remained neutral in regards to the Sino-Soviet Split. All of which are repressive regimes, of course, although Cuba, in terms of freedom and lack of repression, is but the best of a bad lot, while highly repressive North Korea stands only a poor second to the disastrous, genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot. All were influenced by the incubus of Stalinism, which did not disappear after the death of Stalin, but continued in attenuated forms. Yet, in his long discussion of Stalinism in Socialist Practice (37–54), Wallis euphemizes that it was just the “first epoch of socialism”! This ignores, of course, that Stalinism, both with and without Stalin, made socialism synonymous with gulags, repression, lack of individual freedom, secret police, and the dreaded knock on the door at 3am. And that’s not to mention massive goods shortages, inefficient and low-wage economies, material deprivation except for the nomenklatura elite, and long queues just to buy ordinary things such as a loaf of bread!
But not only that. Stalinism in the young Soviet Union began earlier than the accession of power by Stalin in 1924; it already existed under the “halcyon” rule of Lenin and Trotsky, who outlawed opposition parties, even if they were socialist, and removed their members who had been democratically elected to Soviet offices; forcibly dissolved the elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918 because the Bolsheviks won only a plurality, not a majority, of the votes; instituted the Cheka with unlimited powers to root out “counterrevolutionaries;” and brutally and bloodily suppressed the sailors’ rebellion in Kronstadt, where the sailors had risen up to oppose the Bolsheviks’ abuse of power. Indeed, it was Lenin who coined the infamous definition of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as meaning the rule of force untrammeled by law! See The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918), where Lenin states, “The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.”[1]
But Lenin’s definition is in direct contradistinction to what Marx had originally meant by it. Marx himself viewed the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as making draconian inroads on the rule of property, not on individuals; which was a distinction Lenin and the Bolsheviks, including Trotsky (who wrote his own infamous defense of Lenin’s policies in Terrorism and Communism (1920)), soon made moot. So, decoding Lenin: “proletariat” is the Bolshevik Party and the Cheka, while “bourgeoisie” comprises Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, anarchists, and non-Bolshevik socialists, as well as capitalists and counterrevolutionaries!
Trotsky, in “Hue and Cry over Kronstadt” (1938), divided the workers into three categories: “advanced,” “vacillating” and “backward,” and suggested denying the right to vote and participate politically to any who were not “advanced.”[2] Stephen F. Cohen, in Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (1973), pointedly noted that Trotsky’s harsh, trenchant criticisms of this Stalinized Communist Party now firmly in power went unheeded by many other communists because of “his sudden commitment to democratic procedures being [considered] suspect if only because previously he had been among the most authoritarian of Bolshevik leaders.”[3]
Early Bolshevism during the long Russian Civil War (1918–21) also produced one of the worst theoretical innovations in the history of Marxism — War Communism, where the entire economy, now ravaged, functioned only through command, forcible requisition, and enforced penury. This was actually seen as a precursor to — communism! It was even given a theoretical justification in one of the silliest books in the annals of Marxism, Bukharin’s Economics of the Transition Period (1920). Marx’s view of course was that communism, where all received goods “from each to his ability, to each according to his needs,” implying a prosperous, highly productive economy where there are enough goods to satisfy all “to each according to his needs,” bears no resemblance whatsoever to the enforced penury of War Communism and the Civil War. Such a theory, echoing Marx’s famous remark that he “stood Hegel on his head,” stands Marx on his head as well.
Early Bolshevism in power, Stalinism prior to the rule of Stalin, was certainly not without its critics with Leftist bona fides. The American anarchist Emma Goldman, deported to revolutionary Russia as a “subversive,” was a noted and eloquent critic, and wrote two highly acclaimed books criticizing the regime upon her return to the U.S., including My Disillusionment in Russia (1923). In it, she praises Bertrand Russell,[4] another noted Leftist, who was visiting Russia as part of the British Independent Labour Party delegation and wanted to find out the truth, not just what the regime in power said was the truth. Russell also wrote a noted book criticizing both Bolshevism and Bolshevik political practice: The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920). He wrote there, “The existing capitalist system is doomed. Its injustice is so glaring that only ignorance and tradition could lead wage earners to tolerate it,”[5] but also goes on to say two pages later, “And I believe that while some forms of socialism are immeasurably better than capitalism, others are even worse. Among those that are worse I reckon the form which is being achieved in Russia, not only in itself, but as a more insuperable barrier to progress.”[6] Russell also met and interviewed Lenin, and was unimpressed with him as a person[7] — even though much of the Left lionizes him, without ever having had direct contact with him. As for the peasantry, which constituted 85–90% of the population, they were indifferent or hostile to whomever ruled from Moscow, desiring only to sell their produce at good prices, and not have it forcibly requisitioned, as it was by the fledgling Soviet regime in power.
Head of the Left Mensheviks at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Iulii Martov (better known in the West as Julius Martov) wrote a trenchant critique of Bolshevism in his posthumously published World Bolshevism (1923) that stands out as a closely reasoned and detailed Marxist analysis. While the Left Mensheviks were not all that far apart programmatically from the Bolsheviks, they differed considerably in their approach to democracy, and Martov was punished by the Bolsheviks for this audacity: he was removed from his office in the Supreme Soviet in 1919, to which he had been democratically elected, and then forced into exile, where he died in Germany of tuberculosis at age 49. Rosa Luxemburg was also a noted Marxist critic of Bolshevism, writing two forceful critiques of it: “Leninism or Marxism?” (originally published as “Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy” in Russian and German in 1904) and “The Russian Revolution” (unfinished at the time of her death, 1919). They have been gathered in English in one volume, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? (1961), from which these masterful quotes are taken:
it is a well-known and indisputable fact that without a free and untrammeled press, without the unlimited right of association and assemblage, the rule of the broad mass of the people is entirely unthinkable. . . . Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party — however numerous they may be — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom of the one who thinks differently. . . We have always distinguished the social kernel from the political form of bourgeois democracy; we have always revealed the hard kernel of social inequality hidden under the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom — not in order to reject the latter but to spur the working class into not being satisfied with the shell, but rather, by conquering political power, to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy — not to eliminate democracy altogether.[8]
Other notable Left critics of Bolshevism of the time were council communists Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick. So, opposition to early Bolshevism in power was far from being confined to Rightists or “anticommunists”!
Khrushchev and Gorbachev in the U.S.S.R., Alexander Dubček in Czechoslovakia, and before them, Imre Nagy in Hungary, all tried to reform the Stalinist systems they inherited coming out of the same Stalinized Communist Parties in their respective countries, and all came to bad ends as their efforts failed due to self-interested elites, mostly from these same Communist Parties, who opposed them and, ultimately, removed them from office and political power. Dubček and Nagy were deposed by invading armies from the “fraternal” USSR, and, due to a more “enlightened” form of Stalinism (or in the case of Gorbachev, anti-Communism coming to power) prevailing, Dubček had his life spared. (Nagy was not so lucky.) This same failure to successfully achieve reform in the Stalinist system also prevented computerization of the Soviet economy and society under Brezhnev, lest ideological elites who held the reins of power be subordinated to technocratic ones. While the West avidly computerized, this reluctance to follow suit led to a significant downturn in the Soviet economy. Stalin had prevented the formation of hostile elites forming under his long reign through the use of terror; but the more “enlightened” Stalinism that prevailed later was unable to curb the formation and emergence of self-interested elites.
There is much good literature on the reform process within “already existing socialism” and why it failed, starting notably with Irwin Silber’s Socialism: What Went Wrong? (1994).[9] Silber’s book is an invaluable post-mortem on both what went wrong with Stalinist “socialism” in the USSR, and also, the why of its myriad failures. Silber was one of the founders of the Maoist-oriented New Communist Movement of the 1970s, and founding leader of the Marxist-Leninist New Communist group Line of March (sardonically called “March in Line” because of its strict democratic centralist discipline). Fortunately, Silber mellowed politically in later years, and Socialism: What Went Wrong? is written from a largely social democratic perspective. Moshe Lewin’s Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates (1974)[10] gives in detail the necessary historical background for understanding the crisis that emerged with Stalinist economic practice that gave rise to the economic debates in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe in the 1960s. The book is appropriately subtitled “From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers,” as it all started with Bukharin, an Old Bolshevik who really understood economics (unlike many other Old Bolsheviks), and whose critiques of Stalinist economics were most perceptive, especially its pell-mell rush to industrialization and agricultural collectivization that led to the crises that challenged Soviet economists in the 1960s and later. Young scholar Chris Miller’s The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy (2016)[11] delineates the economic obstacles in the way of Gorbachev’s attempt to reform the USSR through glasnost and perestroika,[12] especially his struggles with the self-interested entrenched lobbies of the Soviet military-industrial complex and the vastly inefficient collective farms, which ultimately rendered Gorbachev’s reform attempts futile. Khrushchev’s famous 1956 speech on Stalin is also a vital read.
The rest, as is said, is history. The collapse of “Communism” in Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. in 1991 brought euphoria to anticommunist circles in the West, and generated flatulent crowing, as in Francis Fukuyama’s infamous thesis of the “end of history.” For the Western Left it brought disorientation and a sense of historical failure, because the Left had assumed the USSR would always “be there” to counter U.S. capitalism and imperialism. Now that was no more, and for several years afterward the Western Left was disoriented and feeling powerless.
Truth is, Bolshevism’s legacy in the over 100 years since the Revolution of 1917, its specific version of revolutionary socialism as codified in what it called Marxism-Leninism, the overwhelmingly prevalent version of revolutionary socialism worldwide, has made a hash of things. It did so domestically, under the regimes of “already existing socialism,” and internationally, by demanding and getting subservience of the world communist parties to the Soviet Union (“socialism in one country”), making them but de facto agents of the Soviet government acting directly, or through the Comintern. Such is the actual legacy of the “first epoch of socialism,” a legacy left unrecognized by Professor Wallis in Socialist Practice. For if any good has come out of the Bolshevik experience, it’s perhaps limited to the revival of understanding expressed by Bukharin and the Right Opposition, with its emphasis on a balanced economy, making concessions to the peasantry as necessary, opposing pell-mell industrialization, either in the sane version advanced by the Left Opposition or in Stalin’s idiot’s version of it, and achieving “socialism at a snail’s pace”—for unless deflected, the snail will advance directly to its intended destination! Also worthwhile is the revival of the contributions and writings of many Old Bolsheviks purged and even killed by Stalin and consigned by him to the Soviet memory hole. But for Wallis, while properly decrying much of what he sees as resulting from Stalinism, his attitude seems to just be a cavalier, “Back to the drawing board! While our conception’s basically sound, we screwed up on the details.”
But what if the conception is fundamentally unsound in itself? What if there’s something fundamentally wrong with the concept of “socialism” that means complete state ownership of all means of production, as well as the state being the sole purchaser of labor power, except for small, arbitrary areas it allows for private or limited public use, all under the rule of a “vanguard party of the working class” that is self-appointed as the managers of all in contradistinction to, but in the “vanguard”-conceived “interests” of, the supposed “owners,” the working class? Such a state is both a monopoly (i.e., sole seller of what’s produced) and a monopsony (i.e., sole purchaser of inputs, notably labor power), and the negative aspects of both are well known in the literature of mainstream economics, a worthy example of which is Left-wing economist Joan Robinson’s Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933).[13] The effects of both monopoly and monopsony are fewer goods at higher prices, and fewer inputs or labor bought at lower prices, thus benefitting the monopolist / monopsonist, and hurting the consumer / worker. This “socialist” arrangement is nothing if not akin to the capitalist company town, where the workers for the capitalist buy their goods at the company store, and rent their housing from the company realtor! But this monopoly / monopsony arrangement under repressive Stalinism is what caused revolutionary Trotskyist Max Shachtman to break with Trotsky on the nature of the Soviet Union. While Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union under Stalin was a “deformed workers’ state” due to the control by the Stalinist bureaucracy, it was still a “workers’ state,” still socialist, although “deformed,” because of the state monopoly on ownership of the means of production. Shachtman argued instead that the bureaucracy constituted a new class, a new, hostile class opposed to the interests of the working class.[14]
Others followed suit in this critique of repressive Stalinism, and, while these critics did differ somewhat among themselves and used different terminology to describe this phenomenon, with some, such as contemporary Left magazine Jacobin, calling it “state socialism;” while others, such as Raya Dunayevskaya and Tony Cliff, called it “state capitalism”; or as Shachtman himself called it, “bureaucratic collectivism”; while others, notably the Yugoslav dissident communist Milovan Djilas, referred to it as rule by a “new class;” they all meant the same thing, and all of them agreed, it was reprehensible, authoritarian, and antidemocratic. Thus, it was not just getting control of the state apparatus that was crucial to building socialism. It was just as important, if not more so, to ensure democratic control over those who headed the state apparatus — for without such control, there would be no democratic socialism, only an authoritarian collectivist rule over the people, same as in the old arrangements that the revolution was supposed to abolish. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” redux?[15]
To his credit, Wallis does partially recognize these anti-democratic conundrums in the historical experience of “already existing socialism.” He notes Marx’s “insistence that the revolution of the working class must be achieved by the workers themselves,” citing Marx’s “Inaugural Address to the International Working Men’s Association” of 1864. However, Wallis continues with this rather vague and abstract caveat: “Whether and to what extent this is possible in any period — with all the historical changes that may occur in the social make-up and geographical placement of the working class — will be for all of us to determine” (17).[16] He’s thus leaving himself open to “revolutionary substitutionism” if the working class should default in its supposed revolutionary duty; and, Wallis clearly states, “While a vanguard is needed in order to dismantle the existing state, autonomous self-managed associations are needed — as ‘associated producers’ implies — for running the new society” (34). He thus sees the “need” for the workers themselves to democratically self-govern, in clear contradistinction to the way Lenin and Stalin operated. Earlier on the same page, Wallis states, “Marx’s notion of ‘associated producers’ implies democratic — and, where possible, consensual — self-government, comparable to what is referred to, in workplace settings, as self-management. The core principle is universal participation — which in any case will be indispensable to the society-wide task of economic / ecological conversion. This is an approach to governing which, as we noted, has been put forward as an alternative to the ultimately unsuccessful experiences of twentieth-century socialism.”
Victor Wallis is most favorably disposed toward Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and considers that, whereas Mao “adapted Marxism” (18), Deng Xiaoping “repudiated Marxism” (19) with his policies of “reform and opening up” and “using capitalism to build socialism.” But it was Deng’s policy approach that modernized the Chinese economy and ultimately made it a world economic powerhouse, while Mao’s approach kept China as only a regional power in Asia. Both approaches were specifically Chinese variants and “Left” adaptations of Stalinism, and Deng’s economic liberalization did not lead to greater political or social liberties for the Chinese working masses — as was made clear when Deng ordered in the military to crush the demonstration at Tiananmen Square in 1996. Today, China, same as Vietnam, is an economic hybrid with domestic privately-owned, foreign investor-owned, and state-owned means of production, and both the Chinese and the Vietnamese economies are integrated into the world capitalist trade economy — under the strict rule, of course, of their respective Communist Parties! But the “fraternity” of Communist rule in both places has not prevented frictions arising from rival nationalist claims, particularly in Vietnam’s rivalry with China over the latter’s aggressive claims over the mutually shared South China Sea. Historically, the Vietnamese have been assertively nationalist in the face of Chinese attempts at hegemony, going all the way back to 938 CE, when Vietnam decisively defeated an invading Chinese army and kept its independence from Chinese domination. China, as the largest geographic entity in the region, along with a decided cultural preeminence, has often tried to dominate its smaller neighbors, notably in Southeast Asia. For which China has garnered much resentment from these fierce “neighbors.” Needless to say, this still goes on today, and China, while once subdued and humiliated by Western imperialism and colonialism, has often historically and in the present been a bully toward its neighbors. Much as the USSR dominated its neighbors, or certainly tried to. Somehow, adherence to Stalinist “Marxism” has not prevented great-power chauvinism! Nor has it prevented or attenuated the rise of multiple nationalisms in defense against such chauvinism, despite various claims to “proletarian internationalism”!
But back to Socialist Practice’s reckoning with “already existing socialism.” With no sense of irony whatsoever, Wallis sees as a positive development, despite the collapse of “Communism” in the USSR and Eastern Europe, the growing attractiveness of socialism in the prosperous and advanced capitalist West, particularly among the young, while he’s dismissive of the hostility to socialism among the populations of the formerly “Socialist” Eastern Europe and the USSR — hostility toward “Socialism” from the very people who’d lived under it for decades (61–62)! Somehow, enthusiastic neophytes who have no first-hand experience of living under such Stalinized “Socialism” are far superior to rueful experienced veterans who had lived under it and because of that, reject it! Now it may be, as Michael Parenti argues in Blackshirts and Reds (1997), that the people of the former USSR and Eastern Europe will have “buyer’s remorse” when they realize the collapse of “Communism” means also the collapse of the social safety net that was also part of such societies,[17] but that hasn’t been the case so far — there seems to be little nostalgia for these “lost” regimes among the populations of Eastern Europe and the USSR. Victor Wallis’s “first epoch of socialism” just did not turn out well on a number of counts. Period. It is an especially black mark on a certain conception, of “revolutionary socialism,” one that grew directly out of the Bolshevik conception of Marxism as enunciated not only by Lenin, but also by Stalin and Brezhnev, was vainly subjected to attempted reform by Khrushchev and Gorbachev, and then just collapsed and died, “not with a bang, but with a whimper.” The Revolution failed. Simple as that.
Such is the historical practice of “already existing socialism,” of Stalinism from Lenin through Gorbachev, of the “first epoch of socialism” that, somehow, Victor Wallis finds so endearing, despite all. What it more accurately portends is — a massive failure for revolutionary socialism, and a pointed questioning of whether such an approach to transforming capitalism does what it’s supposedly intended to do. After all, “already existing socialism” didn’t last even 75 years in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, and where the Stalinist model of socialism does still exist; in China, Vietnam, North Korea, Laos, and Cuba — with the exception of North Korea — all of them have embraced major aspects of capitalism and market-oriented economies. We might also add the repressive regimes of Venezuela and Nicaragua, both headed by avowed socialists, although without a state collectivism as extensive as in the former examples. Far from overthrowing capitalism, revolutionary socialism, it seems clear, was overthrown by capitalism itself. Which is certainly no cause for celebration for us who adhere to socialist values of humanism, democracy, and full human development. On the contrary, revolutionary socialism proved itself to be a dead end.
These failed “socialist” regimes, plus the scenarios given above on how a socialist revolution in an advanced capitalist country such as the U.S. would have to come to power, show that the success of revolutionary socialism is so implausible as to rule itself out as a possibility. Not that I’m against revolutions per se. But as a socialist of the “Left wing of the feasible” bent, I’m not going to waste time or energy on advancing the unfeasible.
But is that the end of the story? This author, a democratic socialist, i.e., a “mere” social democrat, says resoundingly, “No!” It is time to take a second look, I say, at what Professor Wallis so cavalierly dismissed as the “social-democratic variant” that he alleges has no “coherent vision of social transformation,” and is “just a hodgepodge of socialist proposals grafted onto a presumedly indestructible capitalist framework.”[18] For indeed, it is capitalism that has proved far more “indestructible” than its “revolutionary socialist variant”! Yes, socialist ideas do live on, deservedly, and even come to life in mass movements such as that of Bernie Sanders’s two campaigns for President, despite their being but a, “hodgepodge of socialist proposals.” To which we can add, as of September 2025, Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York City on a platform which is both clearly socialist, and which is also “reformist” in that it specifically wants to reform New York City along decidedly pragmatic socialist lines. Which is more, much more, than can be said for revolutionary socialism, which has simply died and collapsed, despite having come to power, stayed in power long enough to show what it could and could not do, and was indeed given a fair chance to show its mettle! It’s high time to say “Next!” So, let us now look more closely at this “social-democratic variant.”
To ironically invoke Margaret Thatcher’s TINA — “There is no alternative” (pace!) — we socialists, myself included, would certainly agree that today’s neoliberal capitalist status quo is intolerable, and that liberalism left by itself, with no input from progressivism or social democracy, is inadequate. On these, Victor Wallis and I would find common agreement. However, with socialist revolution ruled out as unrealistic, that leaves but one real alternative: the “social-democratic variant” that Wallis so disdains and rejects. But has the “social-democratic variant” been tried and found successful? While Wallis would undoubtedly say “No,” he would be contradicted with the facts so well presented in British historian Donald Sassoon’s One Hundred Years of Socialism (1996),[19] an appreciative look at social democracy in Western Europe in the hundred years since the founding of the Second International, with special attention given to social democracy in power there after World War II. Sassoon finds that, starting with the Scandinavian countries in the 1930s, and notably following World War II in the rest of Western Europe, social democracy instituted the welfare state, established a firm social safety net, and broke the connection between being working class and living in penury, all with much acclaim and appreciation by the vast majority of these countries’ populations; with the pioneering Scandinavian countries repeatedly surveyed as the happiest societies in the world. These reforms were so popular that they could not be dismantled even when conservatives came to power, in Scandinavia or elsewhere. A prime example being, of course, Margaret Thatcher not dismantling Britain’s National Health Service. A more truncated version also came to the United States with the New Deal, which received the same acclaim and appreciation from the vast majority of the U.S. population. As the old saying goes, this is certainly nothing to sneeze at! This, both in Western Europe and in the U.S., is a prime example of Michael Harrington’s “Left wing of the feasible.” For the point is to improve the material and psychological well-being of the working class and reduce poverty greatly, establish a social safety net to help the destitute and unfortunate, and, in short, improve ordinary people’s lives in the here and now, not in some post-revolutionary utopia far off in an indefinite future, where, supposedly at last, all will be “perfect forever”! Such is but the ultimate in utopian thinking, although it has a most hoary pedigree in orthodox Marxism.
To Wallis this is but a “hodgepodge of socialist proposals,” not real socialism. However, to the Right, and especially today in the U.S. in the Republican Party, this “hodgepodge” is real “socialism,” stealth Bolshevism in power, which they want to dismantle! Ridiculous, of course; but then, we live in times when the ridiculous is often the commonplace and has the support at present, certainly, in the roughly 40% of the populace comprising the avid MAGA base — at least before the Epstein files scandal.
So no, the “social-democratic variant” has not failed. Yes, it often seems inadequate, and that is a trenchant and true critique of it. But inadequacy is not failure, and inadequacy in the present can be corrected by a social-democratic political practice that can win people over, and put able politicians in office who can propose and advance legislation that will enhance its adequacy. Yes, it will be piecemeal and incremental, but it will improve matters. Improving the material and psychological lives of ordinary people in the here and now is certainly a worthy goal of all socialists, and should be viewed by all socialists as such. To borrow from Joe Hill’s famous socialist song, we just don’t have time to wait for some future “pie in the sky,” no matter how supposedly “inevitable.” Indeed, the revolutionary socialist movement has been waiting for the “inevitable” socialist revolution since at least the days of the Chartists in the 1830s, if not all the way back to the French Revolution. The pungent truth is the revolutionary socialists have been waiting for the “inevitable” socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist countries (where Marx was convinced it would first occur) longer than the protagonists in Samuel Beckett’s famous play have been waiting for Godot! But to date, the “socialist” revolutions have successfully occurred only in backward countries — and, as the sad history of such revolutions in power shows, created only a backward socialism, be it Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, or Castroist. Such, to emphasize again, is the real history of Victor Wallis’s “first epoch of socialism.”
While Marx was certainly a seminal and influential thinker, he was not an infallible prophet. Like any and all human beings, he too made mistakes. But to say so in orthodox Marxist circles (such as the ones Victor Wallis is most at home in) is to express the rankest of heresies! Fortunately, such did not dissuade Eduard Bernstein, the founding ideologist of reformist socialism, i.e., democratic socialism or social democracy. An activist in German socialism and the German Social Democratic Party since the early 1870s, he was exiled for his activities, first to Switzerland and then to London, where he met and collaborated with Engels. His active involvement in the socialist movement led him to question some of Marx’s key prognostications, notably that capitalism led inevitably to workers’ immiseration, that it would forever be beset with economic crises which would only get worse, and that the only solution to such was socialist revolution by the working class, which was “inevitable.” What Bernstein saw in reality was that capitalism was not inexorably making matters worse for the working class and leading more and more to their degradation and immiseration; the worst aspects of capitalism could indeed be ameliorated through reforms within the framework of capitalism; and that building and extending such reforms was the proper program of the socialist movement, not preparation for “inevitable” revolutions, which, despite such “inevitability,” were far off in some indefinite future. In this open call for reformism, Bernstein was just giving voice and articulation to the actual practice of German and other European Social Democratic Parties; but, for expressing such views openly as he did in his writings, he was vehemently opposed within such parties and branded a “revisionist” — a term Bernstein openly and courageously embraced! He gave voice to these analyses in his Evolutionary Socialism (1899). The book was received with consternation by the parties of official Social Democracy, for no one wanted to admit that Marx was wrong, and that reform, not revolution, could and would make the lot of the working class much, much better! Nor did the Social Democracy want to admit it was doing precisely in practice what Bernstein said it should be doing, as the thrall of adherence to orthodox Marxism was too great. Thus, Bernstein was opposed both by the center of the German Social Democratic Party as represented by Kautsky, and by the Left as represented by Rosa Luxemburg, who wrote a small book “refuting” Bernstein: Reform or Revolution? (1900/08). However, try as she may, and she is eloquent in her attempt, of course, for Luxemburg was an excellent thinker and writer — Bernstein, in my opinion, still wins the argument. Luxemburg just can’t refute Bernstein from her standpoint of revolutionary Marxist orthodoxy, and in the end can only fall back on the deus ex machina that eventually capitalism will have such a severe economic crisis that socialist revolution will be the only way out.
I’ve read Evolutionary Socialism twice, and what struck me about the book is that, while I don’t agree with everything Bernstein wrote there (he was perhaps too sanguine about capitalism’s ability to self-ameliorate, and he advocated a “socialist” colonialism that would humanely lift the benighted indigenous peoples of the colonies out of their ignorance and superstition, to which I disagree), the strength of Bernstein in Evolutionary Socialism is that he asks all the right questions. I urge every socialist to read Evolutionary Socialism. (Most, of course, haven’t.) Read Reform or Revolution? also, and see where Luxemburg just can’t properly answer Bernstein.
“Revisionist” is an interesting word because although used politically, it’s more of a religious term than a political one. It’s akin to the religious concept of “heretic” or “apostate,” and means someone who has deviated from or repudiated the true theology, hagiography, holy books, and infallible founders and prophets. But of course, many socialist movements, especially those adhering to “orthodox Marxism” of various varieties, act as secular religious sects. To question such “Marxist orthodoxy,” as Bernstein did, is the ultimate in heresy or apostasy! Within the thoroughly Stalinized Communist movements and governments, needless to say, “revisionist” became an epithet bandied about to excoriate one’s internal opponents.
Marx, Engels, Bernstein, Luxemburg, and Lenin all wrote before John Maynard Keynes, when the standard economic response to downturns in the business cycle that led to recessions and depressions was to cut back on government spending and practice austerity, which would make matters worse, leading eventually to deeper and deeper “economic crises.” Finally, these recurring, ever-worsening crises would be too much for the working class to bear, and would usher in the “inevitable” socialist revolution. But Keynes showed that, although the ups and downs of the business cycle couldn’t be eliminated, downturns in the business cycle leading to recessions and depressions could be tamed, domesticated, attenuated, through proper fiscal policy, particularly deficit spending, and could reverse the downward trend and speed economic recovery. And Keynesianism worked, and worked well! Economic history since the Great Depression of the 1930s proves it. This, of course, gives capitalism a new lease on life, as well as firmly suggesting that the problem may not be so much capitalism but, rather, the neoliberal managing of it, with neoliberalism looking down on Keynesian solutions in favor of letting the markets do as they will, which only prolongs the economic misery. Which is also established by economic history.
Capitalism also successfully “enhanced” workers’ purchasing power, starting in the 1920s, through providing workers with consumer credit for purchases. This whole matter of successful extension of credit and Keynesian remedies is well delineated in Alan Nasser’s Overripe Economy, an important Left-wing history, analysis, and critique of such mechanisms.[20] Consumer credit, needless to say, attenuated the Marxist “crisis of overproduction” by which goods produced by capitalists went unsold because no one could afford to buy them. Thus, capitalism proved itself more resilient than either Marx or the “orthodox Marxists” imagined. If this be Wallis’s “presumably indestructible capitalist framework” he rejects, so be it. Capitalism is more “indestructible” than Wallis thought!
This is further borne out by three very recent contributions to the literature on revolution. The first is Jeff Goodwin’s “The Fantasy of Revolution,” in the socialist theoretical journal Catalyst,[21] an essay on revolution commenting on a statistical analysis of 372 insurrectionary movements between 1899 and 2019, both successful and unsuccessful, which demonstrated that the most successful upsurges were urban ones that occurred in middle-income countries and amounted only to changes of regime, not to changes in class structure or economic organization — in direct contrast to the Bolshevik-legacy overthrows of the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese / Laotian, or Cuban type. (The Eastern European and North Korean “revolutions,” needless to say, happened as a direct result of Soviet military occupation.) In other words, popular socialist revolutions simply didn’t happen, much to the chagrin of socialists. The second is Daniel Immerwahr’s “Death to the Shah,” on the contingent nature of the unexpected revolution in Iran that overthrew the Shah.[22] An overthrow that started out with high hopes, but ended up replacing the reactionary rule of the Shah with the arguably far-worse counterrevolution of the Islamist mullahs, who replaced the Shah’s modernizing repression with a totalitarian theocracy that subordinated everything to a medieval, highly authoritarian concept of religious rule, one that fundamentally attacked the very notions of modernity (except in a highly-restricted technocratic sense), secularism, democratic and human rights, and tolerance itself. Hardly auspicious for would-be revolutionaries! The third piece is an article from Jacobin: Chris Kutalik’s “What We Can Learn from Nordic Socialism,”[23] a short but pithy review-essay of the book Nordic Socialism (2025) by Leftist Danish MP Pelle Dragsted,[24] which argues for extensive social-democratic reforms that go beyond mere welfarism. It is yet another positive contribution to the socialist literature on the hows and whys of making social democracy work.
The discussion above summarizes Wallis’s errors in Socialist Practice. But there’s more to Socialist Practice than those. On the positive side, late in the book, Victor Wallis advocates for more humane treatment of prisoners (180–83), shows appreciation for the songs arising out of the revolutionary and labor movements (205–23), as well as acknowledging the seminal critique of contemporary capitalism inherent in George Carlin (154) — a most interesting anomaly, an outstanding moral and political philosopher doing duty as a stand-up comedian! On all this I’m in agreement with Victor Wallis, and extend my comradely hand to him in solidarity and support. Which is as far from “trashing” Socialist Practice as one can get! Once again, my disagreements have nothing to do with Victor Wallis personally, nor with any substantive deficiencies with Socialist Practice, which is as able an exposition of revolutionary socialism as one is liable to get. No, the problem is with the limitations of the argument for revolutionary socialism over social-democratic reformism itself!
Simply put, revolutionary socialism has done so much harm historically and presently, while, by contrast, “mere” social-democratic reformism, this “hodgepodge of socialist proposals” has done so much good. It’s also far more feasible, workable, and popular, which has been shown time and again both by the U.S. New Deal and the welfare states of Western Europe and Scandinavia, while the regimes of revolutionary socialism, whether in the former USSR and Eastern Europe, or China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, or Cuba, have foundered both economically and politically, as well as revealing themselves to be inherently repressive and violative of basic human rights, dignity, and liberty. Nor is that “revolutionary” halfway house of Venezuela, whether under Chavez or Maduro, any more encouraging. The same can be said of other “halfway house” regimes that try to embrace a more Bolshevik-style course than a social-democratic one. (Nicaragua under Ortega comes to mind here.) Simply put, socialism (which means much more to ethically-minded socialists than just collective ownership of the means of production) and repression of basic democratic rights just don’t mix! Trying to build a real socialism without “bourgeois niceties” such as what we have enshrined in the U.S. Bill of Rights is simply an impossibility, and is shown to be such by the very success of those welfare states which both enhance the psychological and material well-being of the working class and also maintain “bourgeois niceties” such as free elections and security from police repression.
But as I believe I’ve shown, in the end the burden of proof of revolutionary socialism lies squarely on the shoulders of the revolutionaries themselves. If the “social-democratic variant” cannot work, it is up to the socialist revolutionaries to prove it. But as I believe I’ve further shown, they cannot do that; and also, their revolutionary socialism is but a will o’ the wisp, having both failed in practice, as well as being unfeasible in the present. |P
[1] V. I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918), in Lenin Selected Works, vol. 3 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1965), 11.
[2] Leon Trotsky, “Hue and Cry over Kronstadt,” The New International 4, no. 4 (April 1938): 103–06, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/01/kronstadt.htm>. See also Leon Trotsky, “Moralists and Sycophants Against Marxism: Peddlers of Indulgences and Their Socialist Allies, or the Cuckoo in a Strange Nest” The New International 5, no. 8 (August 1939): 229–33, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/06/moral.htm>.
[3] Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York: Random House, 1975), 155.
[4] Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003), 58.
[5] Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 19.
[6] Ibid., 21.
[7] Ibid., 32–33.
[8] Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), 67, 69, 77.
[9] Irwin Silber, Socialism: What Went Wrong? (London: Pluto Press, 1994).
[10] Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).
[11] Chris Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
[12] [Russian] “Openness” and “restructuring.” These terms were used as political slogans within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
[13] Joan Robinson, Economics of Imperfect Competition (London: MacMillan, 1933).
[14] See, e.g., Max Schactman, “The Crisis in the American Party: An Open Letter in Reply to Comrade Leon Trotsky,” The New International 6, no. 2 (March 1940): 43–51, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/shachtma/1940/03/crisis.htm>. Schactman argues that the Stalinized Soviet Union was indeed capable of pursuing “reactionary” policies.
[15] The notable last line in the Who’s song “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (1971).
[16] Emphasis added. By the dictionary definition of words, doesn’t this imply determination by both workers and non-workers?
[17] Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1997), 116–20.
[18] See above where I quote Wallis, Socialist Practice, 41.
[19] Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996).
[20] Alan Nasser, Overripe Economy: American Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy (London: Pluto Press, 2018). See also my review of Nasser’s book in MR Online (May 25, 2019), <https://mronline.org/2019/05/25/review-of-alan-nassers-overrripe-economy/>.
[21] Jeff Goodwin, “The Fantasy of Revolution,” Catalyst 9, no. 1 (Spring 2025).
[22] Daniel Immerwahr, “Death to the Shah,” The New Yorker (August 11, 2025).
[23] Chris Kutalik, “What We Can Learn from Nordic Socialism,” Jacobin (September 9, 2025), <https://jacobin.com/2025/09/nordic-socialism-dragsted-poulantzas-reforms>.
[24] Pelle Dragsted, Nordic Socialism: The Path Toward a Democratic Economy, trans. William Banks (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2025).
