Neo-Marxists: “That Wasn’t Real Communism”: The Lies that Never End!

Walk around an Australian university campus long enough and sooner or later you will encounter one of the most durable political arguments ever devised. Mention the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, East Germany or another disastrous communist experiment and somebody will produce the magic words: "But that wasn't real communism. Real communism has never been tried."

It is an extraordinarily convenient defence because it makes communism almost impossible to falsify. Capitalism must answer for every recession, corporate scandal, inequality and market failure occurring under systems called capitalist. Christianity is routinely asked to answer for every atrocity committed by somebody carrying a cross. Liberal democracy is judged by the governments that actually exist. Communism, however, is sometimes granted a unique intellectual privilege: its successes belong to communism while its catastrophes can be expelled from the definition.

There is nevertheless a grain of truth buried inside the slogan, and critics of Marxism should concede it immediately. Karl Marx's ultimate communist society was not simply the Soviet Union with more tractors. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx distinguished between a lower and higher phase of communist society. The famous principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," belonged to the higher phase, after immense social and economic transformation had occurred. Marx also envisaged a transitional period between capitalism and communism involving the political rule of the proletariat.

Lenin subsequently developed this distinction in The State and Revolution. What came commonly to be called socialism was identified with the first or lower phase of communist society, while complete communism lay farther ahead; always further ahead! Lenin explicitly recognised that this first phase would retain a state and rules of distribution because society could not leap instantly from capitalism into the final communist condition.

So, when a student says Stalin's Soviet Union was not Marx's final classless communist society, the student is at least technically correct. The interesting question begins immediately afterwards: why did attempts to travel towards that promised society repeatedly produce powerful totalitarian nightmare states rather than a stateless paradise?

That is the question the slogan "real communism has never been tried" tends to evade.

The Soviet revolutionaries did not seize power in 1917 while promising to establish neoliberal capitalism and accidentally construct a communist dictatorship. Lenin was a Marxist revolutionary who had spent years thinking and writing about precisely the transition from capitalism to communism. His State and Revolution, written in 1917, explicitly discussed Marx's transitional state, the lower phase of communist society and the eventual disappearance of the state. Or so he thought.

This matters because there is an enormous difference between saying that the Soviet Union never achieved Marx's final destination and saying that the communist project had nothing to do with the road taken towards it. If twenty expeditions attempt to cross the same mountain range, following variations of the same map, and expedition after expedition ends in disaster before reaching Shangri-La, it becomes increasingly inadequate to say that Shangri-La remains beautiful because nobody arrived there. Perhaps the problem is the journey: communism itself must be at fault.

The fundamental difficulty is power. Marxism proposes an enormous transformation of property relations. Private ownership of major means of production must disappear. The existing economic order must be overturned. Classes must ultimately disappear. Whatever beautiful condition is imagined at the end, somebody has to perform the transition.

Who?

The answer historically has been the revolutionary state. And once a government acquires sufficient power to seize property, reorganise production, suppress hostile classes, control investment and defeat counter-revolution, we encounter one of the oldest problems in political philosophy: why should people possessing extraordinary power voluntarily surrender it later?

The communist answer was that the state would eventually become unnecessary. Lenin argued that once classes disappeared, the state would ultimately wither away. Yet he also acknowledged that during the lower phase the state remained necessary to safeguard the new property system and rules of distribution.

History supplied a rather different punch line. The state did not wither away. The people sometimes did.

This is not merely a cheap joke about Stalin. It identifies a structural problem. Abolishing independent centres of economic power can make political power more concentrated rather than less. Under capitalism, a wealthy businessman may possess enormous economic influence but he does not normally possess the legal authority to arrest you. A government official may possess coercive authority but does not necessarily own your workplace. Combine political control with extensive control over employment, production, housing and distribution and the distinction begins disappearing.

The person allocating your job may ultimately answer to the same political structure that controls the police. That is an enormous concentration and centralisation of social power.

A Marxist can reply that such concentration was never supposed to become permanent. But that returns us to the empirical question: what institutional mechanism guarantees that the dictatorship established during the transition eventually abolishes itself? Human beings do not become angels because private property has been nationalised.

There is another problem with the "never tried" defence. Experiments do not have to reach their intended endpoint before we learn something from them. Suppose an engineer proposes an aircraft capable of reaching Mars. Twenty prototypes explode during take-off. It would be technically correct to say that the Mars aircraft has never actually flown to Mars. It would nevertheless be ridiculous to conclude that the explosions tell us nothing about the design because the intended destination was never reached. The failures during transition are evidence about the feasibility of the transition.

This distinction becomes particularly important when talking to young people attracted to Marxism because they are dissatisfied with real problems in contemporary capitalism. Housing is expensive. Corporate power can become excessive. Wealth can influence politics. Young people may face insecure employment and bleak prospects of home ownership. Universities themselves can expose students to substantial debts while promising uncertain economic returns. It is perfectly reasonable for students to criticise these things.

But dissatisfaction with capitalism does not establish the truth of Marxism. That is elementary logic. Showing that system A has defects does not demonstrate that system B works. Yet political arguments routinely commit precisely this error. A student identifies inequality under capitalism and then behaves as though a communist alternative has thereby been vindicated. Nothing of the sort follows. The relevant comparison is not imperfect capitalism against imaginary perfect communism. It is imperfect real-world institutions against plausible alternatives operating with imperfect human beings.

This is where utopian political systems possess a tremendous rhetorical advantage. Capitalism exists, so its defects can be photographed. The ideal communist society does not exist, so its defects cannot.

Capitalism has landlords, bankers, corrupt politicians, recessions and billionaires. Perfect communism has diagrams. It is difficult for reality to compete with diagrams.

The campus version can become particularly strange because students living inside prosperous liberal democracies sometimes advocate revolutionary systems while enjoying freedoms that historical communist governments frequently restricted. They can form Marxist societies, distribute literature, denounce the government, insult political leaders and campaign openly for radical transformation. The police generally do not arrive at midnight because somebody has been reading Marx. That freedom is worth noticing.

Serious thought means asking why revolutionary communist movements repeatedly generated coercive institutions. It means asking why central economic planning encountered severe information and incentive problems. It means asking why political dissent became dangerous in all communist states. It means asking why the transitional dictatorship repeatedly proved considerably better at dictatorship than transition. Simply declaring every failure "not real communism" answers none of these questions.

The deeper lesson concerns political perfectionism. Communism imagines the eventual transcendence of profound conflicts over property, class and distribution. Marx thought the higher phase would become possible only after enormous development of productive forces and corresponding human and social transformation. The difficulty is that political institutions must deal with the humans who exist before that transformation, not the humans who are supposed to emerge afterwards.

Those humans remain ambitious, selfish, generous, tribal, creative, jealous, compassionate, aggressive, cooperative and power-seeking. Any political system that requires radically transformed human beings before its safeguards become unnecessary has a dangerous problem during the interval. That interval is where history happens.

So, when the enthusiastic campus Marxist cub announces that "real communism has never been tried," the answer should not merely be to shout "Stalin!" across the quadrangle. Grant the definitional point and then ask the harder question. Why wasn't it achieved?

Why did revolutions explicitly inspired by Marxism repeatedly fail to reach the promised destination? Why did the transitional state grow instead of disappearing? Why did concentrated economic control so often accompany concentrated political control? What mechanism would make the next attempt fundamentally different, and what evidence supports believing that mechanism would work? Why did over 100 million people have to die to show the failure of the Marxist communist dream?

Those are the sorts of questions that need to be asked of the neo-Marxist students, assuming that they don't bash you! On this, read on:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-17/one-nation-alleged-ekka-assault/107045782

"A One Nation staffer was injured during an assault at the Royal Queensland Show in Brisbane on Friday, according to the party.

One Nation chief of staff James Ashby told 4BC a staffer in her 60s was on her way to the party's stall when she was verbally assaulted by three women and a man, before the situation escalated and the staffer was punched in the ribs.

"She now has one broken rib, she's got enormous bruising and she's had to go through the unedifying process of having to strip down in front of police so that they can take photographs of her injuries," Mr Ashby said.

He said the staffer had been released from the hospital over the weekend.

In a social media post, the party said a "much-valued female member of the One Nation team was physically assaulted by a group of three young women and one young man at the Ekka festival in Brisbane, leading to a broken rib".

"One Nation would like to condemn this violent attack in the strongest possible terms. The attackers should be ashamed of themselves," the statement read.

"The matter is with the Queensland Police and is currently being investigated."

Queensland Police Service said it was aware of the allegations, but had not received a formal complaint.

Mr Ashby said it was his opinion the staffer had been targeted due to her One Nation shirt.

"These are the same young women who demand respect for women, especially when it comes to domestic violence, and yet they stood by, spat on her and allowed their male counterpart to lay vicious blows on her to break a rib," he said.

He told the AAP the woman was "set upon with foul language" after walking through the gates.

"She ignored them, and as she continued walking they called her an ignorant (expletive) and that's when they set upon her."

The staffer was recovering after being hospitalised but was badly bruised and shaken, Mr Ashby said.

"She's really shaken and extremely sore. Broken ribs aren't fun," Mr Ashby said.

"I don't want any of my staff feeling that way."

Queensland Ambulance Service said it had no record of ambulances dispatched to the Ekka for a woman in her 60s with injured ribs on either Thursday or Friday.

One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce told reporters today the party had been in contact with the woman.

"This is not made up," he said. "This person was spat on, they were punched, they have a broken rib.

"We have got to really, within this space, call it for what it is. This is completely outrageous."

RNA chief executive Brendan Christou said the organisation had been made aware of an alleged incident by Queensland police.

"The safety and wellbeing of our visitors, exhibitors, staff and everyone involved in the Show is our highest priority, and this allegation is extremely concerning," he said.

"The Ekka is a family-friendly event and we do not condone any form of violence."

He said the RNA will assist police in any inquiries."