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Since my PhD years in Manchester and the 2022 Chilean presidential elections (maybe before that, I think), I have been receiving the same sort of arguments. The USSR collapsed. Cuba is poor. Venezuela is a disaster. North Korea is a nightmare. Therefore, communism is dictatorial and has failed. The conclusion arrives before the analysis even begins. The problem is a definitional one. Marx, in Capital, was precise about what communism means. It is not a state with a red flag. It is not a planned economy with a single party. It is a historical stage that comes after capitalism and socialism, where the coercive state has withered away, class divisions no longer exist, and the organising principle of society is from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. No country in history has reached that stage. What the USSR, Cuba, and the rest represent is socialism, a transitional stage Marx himself described as imperfect and contradictory by definition. Criticising communism by pointing at socialist states is like criticising a destination by describing the road. So the question worth asking is a different one. Did socialism fail? At what precisely? Compared to what alternative? And measured by whose standards? Those three questions are what this article is about. The Soviet Union never claimed to be a communist state. Neither did Cuba, nor the German Democratic Republic, nor any of the Eastern Bloc countries. They called themselves socialist republics, explicitly acknowledging that communism was a goal not yet reached. The USSR, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, said it in the name. This is not a minor semantic point. It is the entire argument. When someone calls the USSR communist and declares communism a failure, they are accepting the most ambitious claim the Soviet party ever made about itself, that it was building something historically unprecedented, while ignoring the part where that same party explicitly acknowledged it had not arrived there yet. They are condemning a destination by pointing at the road and calling it the destination. The regimes that existed were authoritarian socialist states with planned economies and single party rule. Some achieved remarkable things. Some committed atrocities. All of them were contradictory, imperfect, and historically specific. None of them were communism. That distinction matters not to absolve them, but because sloppy definitions produce sloppy conclusions. And sloppy conclusions have been shaping this debate for decades. So let us talk about “failure”. Concretely. In 1917, Russia was one of the most economically backwards countries in Europe. Illiteracy rates exceeded over 60 percent of the population. Life expectancy was around 30 years. Industrial capacity was negligible compared to Western Europe. By 1960, the Soviet Union had eliminated illiteracy almost entirely, built the second largest industrial economy in the world, launched the first satellite and the first human into space, and doubled life expectancy. It did all of this under continuous economic pressure, military threat, and without the centuries of colonial accumulation that funded Western European development. China tells a similar story. In 1949, illiteracy stood at around 80 percent of the population. Today it is under 5 percent. Between 1978 and 2020, China lifted more than 800 million people out of extreme poverty. No country in human history has achieved anything remotely comparable in that timeframe. These are not ideological claims. They are World Bank figures. If this is what “failure” looks like, the word might have lost its meaning. The more honest question is what these systems achieved, what they failed at, and under what conditions. That is a different and more demanding analysis than simply pointing at a collapsed flag. Here is the question that never gets asked. What would these socialist states have achieved without systematic external interference? This is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented history. The Soviet Union was born into a civil war partially financed and militarily supported by fourteen foreign powers, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, between 1918 and 1921. Before the Soviet project had a single decade to consolidate, it had already survived invasion, blockade, and an externally supported attempt to strangle it at birth. Guatemala, 1954. The CIA overthrew Jacobo Árbenz, a democratically elected president whose primary crime was redistributing unused land from the United Fruit Company to landless peasants. Operation PBSUCCESS. Declassified. Not a theory. Chile, 1973. Nixon and Kissinger were explicit. Make the economy scream. The coup that brought Pinochet to power was not a spontaneous military reaction to socialism. It was a coordinated effort involving the CIA, ITT Corporation, and the Chilean right wing. Also declassified. Nicaragua, Congo, Indonesia, Angola. The pattern repeats with enough consistency that calling it coincidence requires a deliberate effort to not see it. Every time a socialist project began showing results, external pressure arrived. Economic blockades, covert operations, military support for opposition groups, currency destabilisation. The game was never played on a neutral field. Calling these projects failures without accounting for that context is not analysis. But let us give the other side its best argument for a moment. If socialist states failed, what did “success” look like then? The Belgian Congo offers an instructive example. Leopold II of Belgium administered the Congo Free State between 1885 and 1908 as a private capitalist enterprise. Rubber quotas were enforced by systematically amputating the hands of workers and their families who did not meet production targets. Historians estimate between 10 and 15 million Congolese died under his administration. The rubber was extracted, the profit was real, and the Belgian economy grew. By the metrics that capitalism measures success, it worked perfectly. Right? India under the British Empire is equally instructive. Between 1765 and 1938, the United Kingdom extracted an estimated 45 trillion dollars from India in today’s values, according to economist Utsa Patnaik’s calculations. During that same period, famines killed tens of millions of Indians while the colonial administration continued exporting food to Britain. The market was functioning. Grain was moving efficiently toward whoever could pay for it. Approximately 30 million people starved. These cases are capitalism operating without the constraints that socialist and labour movements eventually forced onto it through decades of struggle. And then there is the United States, the most cited proof that capitalism “works”. The period of greatest economic expansion and social mobility in US history, the post war decades between 1945 and 1973, was built on the highest marginal tax rates in the country’s history, reaching 91 percent under Eisenhower, massive public investment in infrastructure and education through the GI Bill, and a heavily regulated financial system. It was not the free market. It was the closest the United States ever came to a mixed economy. When the market was actually left to operate freely, the results were different. The Great Depression of 1929 was not an external shock. It was a systemic collapse generated from within, requiring the largest state intervention in US history to survive. The 2008 financial crisis followed the same pattern. Decades of deregulation produced a collapse that was resolved by socialising the losses while the profits had already been privatised. The banks were saved with public money. The people who lost their homes were not. Today, the richest country in the history of human civilisation has approximately 36 million people living in poverty, 27 million without health insurance, and a life expectancy that has been declining for nearly a decade. The market is functioning. The question is for whom. So let us return to where we started. Has communism failed? No. It has never been implemented. That is not a defence of every decision made under socialist governments, nor an erasure of the real suffering that occurred under them. It is a factual observation. You cannot fail at something you have never attempted. The more honest question is whether socialism failed, and the answer is complicated in the way that honest answers usually are. It achieved things that history does not give it credit for. It was systematically undermined in ways that the dominant narrative does not acknowledge. And it carried internal contradictions, particularly around power and institutional design, that it never resolved. That last part matters and deserves its own analysis, which is what the second article in this series is about. But here is what the evidence does not support. The conclusion that capitalism won because it works. The United States needed the New Deal to survive the market. Europe needed decades of socialist pressure to build the welfare states that made it liveable. The countries that rank highest in human development today are mixed economies with strong public institutions, not free market paradises. The question was never communism versus capitalism. It was always who controls the resources, who makes the decisions, and who bears the cost when the system fails. That question has not been answered. It has barely been asked.

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