What is posed here is a loaded question. Any answer will be viewed through the lens of a very narrow idea of what it means to be successful, what the target or benchmark is. The implicit argument here is that you measure success by the existence of a state that implements the policies of a revolutionary party. Asking this of an anarchist is a bit like asking a fish to climb a tree, or assessing an elephant by how much prey it has hunted. The outcome and benefit of revolutionary practices are reduced to a contrary metric, which is further treated as an all-or-nothing proposition. In the Western context, you might have a parallel to this with a social democratic party pointing at the revolutionary Left, and saying that it did not have any party with electoral victories to point to.

One matter of fact that is objectively true is that since 1985, there have been zero successful Marxist-Leninist revolutions that proceeded to the benchmark of becoming a one-party workers' state. (Nepal did overthrow their monarchy and get a communist parliamentary majority, which has since been lost.) This despite 60 years of the theoretical discipline being established, and perhaps another 20-50 years of foundations. Surviving M-L states have economically reconciled themselves with the West and its worldwide market-based order, forswearing the export of revolution and even having extensive trade relations with the most abusive of imperialist governments. Inside Western countries, the governmental intelligence and propaganda apparatus has arguably succeeded in running circles around Marxist-Leninist organizations for 80 years, demonizing and blackmailing and decapitating them. Another way to interpret this is that Marxism-Leninism has been on the retreat for the past 40 years, has not recovered from the loss of 18 out of 23 Communist states from 1989-1992, and in the time since then has not redeveloped a presentation of itself to the world as a subversive force. You would think that the most sophisticated revolutionary theory would be able to at least reorient itself and progress at some rate, after over half a century of remarkable successes.

This is not to call M-L a failure, far from it. 1.5 billion people in 5 countries are categorically better off because of it, and another 500 million people have indirectly benefited from the leftovers of the conditions it created. But it certainly should show us what the world really looks like when we apply a Socialist Scoreboard to it. Moreover, the temporal distance of 1917 and 1949 leads to a wistfulness throughout the left, especially the parts of it that measure themselves by workers' states, and this leads to an atavistic focus on events and tactics and formations from almost a century ago, with a faith that "it will inevitably happen again" detached from any evidence or forward progress towards this in the present.

Especially in the West, the praxis that Marxist-Leninists engage in is not categorically different from what anarchists engage in, except for a few symbolic elections that win 0.1-2.0% of the vote. There is no prospect of a workers' state in the West; the bulk of historical forces are firmly aligned against this emerging in the imperial core.

Anarchist struggles frame themselves on a variety of different scales, and they can be "successful" to different degrees depending on how they benefit people, whether it's small groups, communities, or cities. It's hard to prove that revolutionary Catalonia oriented large parts of the world against fascism, or that the KPAM had an enabling effect on the eventual victories in China and the DPRK, or that the constellation of liberated spaces really might become a living network, rather than just a coincidence.

The overarching goal of anarchists is difficult to pin down, largely because there is no predominant model among anarchists for what that would look like. There is even a division between anarchists who would pursue a framework and anarchists who would avoid a framework completely. The lack of framework is a worthwhile critique; "horizontal" communists have elaborated many of the smaller pieces but have not elaborated much of a vision for what that might look like. I have run into this quagmire myself, and a large part of my life's work is trying to articulate what a world of independent communes and movements could do to measurably overthrow or permanently displace class society and the commodifying tools of the global market, especially in the age of resource collapse and climate catastrophe.

Sure, you have speculative fiction that captures people's imaginations and which people form parts of their identity around. Is it not human to imagine? If there wasn't any power in fiction, you wouldn't see so much control being exercised over making sure popular media adheres to the doctrine of There Is No Alternative.

“Another world is possible because it was possible, we had it” said anarchists who recommended to me The Dawn of Everything, and they were silent when I brought up serious critiques I’d read of it which point out its many methodological flaws.

This is kind of ironic in a thread where you place a demand for receipts. Instead of just hand-waving that there are methodological flaws, what are the flaws? List them.

I've read serious critiques of On Authority and The Origin of the Family that point out many methodological flaws. (One of these in particular is that the latter draws heavily on Lewis Henry Morgan, a 19th-century fraud who basically did blackface towards Native Americans. This is what happens when you have a vibes-based foundational approach to anthropology which hasn't been revised since anthropology became more of a developed discipline.) But I don't expect anyone to eschew Engels, or Marxism, or dialectical materialism, over that.

In terms of works of fiction, being as this is Hexbear, there's a passage that stands out as particularly applicable:

0.000% of communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.

Like it or not, that is all of us. We all engage in wishful thinking as a kind of escapism, we remain mere drops against the wave, and any movement toward a better world is at best only vaguely informed by our wishful thinking right now.

Sorry I took so long to respond to this, I have a fulltime job and attention deficits.

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels

What do you know, this essay is awesome and touches on the importance of communist fiction

I have to ask then, is there value in writing Communist speculative fiction?

I remember that as a kid I watched Spirited Away and the whole subplot with the no-face becoming destructive when engaged in a transactional relationship with the workers in the bathhouse made me think that people act in accordance to their context and that relationships built on vulgar give-and-take are not fulfilling. In other words, from that movie I developed my first childlike sketches of materialism and alienation. I think there is value in writing communist fiction.

I keep coming back to this:  when I ask liberals and anarchists to demonstrate their politics, they point to fiction, that is, things that by definition have not happened.

In a way, isn't that a testament to the power of fiction? Libs and rad-libs (no comment on anarchists, don't want to run afoul of the sectarianism rule) get a lot of their ideas from fiction, and it turns out that fiction in a liberal economic and social order that has thoroughly ground out communism is pretty fucking liberal. Stories are memorable and impressing. That's why humans have used them to convey ideas and values for as long as we've been around.

As another point in favor of "the problem isn't fiction, it's bad fiction," also consider that bad history can have a similarly negative effect on someone's politics. There are liberals who've read a lot about the USSR, China, and other socialist nations and movements, and all it did was push them further into "No iphone gulag 1984" because they read nothing but liberal histories that pushed pro-capital narratives. One of the dreams you describe - "a dream where AmeriKKKa wasn’t evil from the start" - was a dream I used to believe in large part because it was drilled into me for over a decade of history classes.

I have to ask then, is there value in writing Communist speculative fiction?

From a "will this help bring about the revolution" angle, I can't say for sure, despite my arguments above. However, I consider creative fulfillment to be intrinsically valuable as a source of human wellbeing, and ideally one of the results of the revolution would be to allow everyone the time, energy, and tools to pursue it. It's no substitute for reading theory and history, obviously, but human beings can't and don't operate on maximizing utility every waking moment.

This post is almost too good. I'm not good enough with words to articulate my opinion well at the moment other than to say I wholeheartedly agree

Liberals get upset with me for pointing out that the Democrats are genocidal Nazis and I think in some cases it’s because that makes them feel like the problem is too big to solve.

I have felt this too. There is a sort of 'well if that's true, why do anything?' attitude. The idea of working outside the established order is just a non-thing to them. Not even on the table. I honestly think a lot of that stems from how well we as a society have been groomed into (for lack nof a better word) lawfulness. They don't even consider the idea of working outside what society allows.

Think of the fiction we are drenched in. Tell me if this rings a bell. There is a villain who wants to reshape this corrupt world, their motives might even be righteous, but the second they resort to any violence, they are irredeemable. They are no longer human. The heroes have license to treat them as they wish. "He had a point but he went too far. It's a shame really.". Their end is shown as inevitable. Violence perpetrated by the system? As long as it's within the law, it's fine.

I think we are all raised subconsciously knowing this. It creates a sort of fear of being the one made an example of. Being that part of that extremist group that is portrayed as naive and doomed to failure. They don't want to be the bad guy of the story, because the bad guy always loses, and the second you resist unlawfully, you're the bad guy. "We are flawed, but we're still a democracy, right? We have to be. Because if we aren't I will be marked as a villain, and the villain always loses, so what's the point?"

Okay so maybe I ended up saying more than just 'I agree". I hope I didn't get too incoherent.

This is beautiful. There absolutely is value in stories, in narrative. We should be able to tell our stories in ways that feel true to us, that give voice to those dreams and aspirations that aren't just radlib wish fulfillment.

We are the stories we tell ourselves, that we tell to each other. We have been telling stories as long as we have had language, and probably before then, too.

Why should we, as people with principles, concede the realm of story to those who are content to foreclose on a better future, or one where everything just magically works out (don't look too hard under the hood though, it's all genocide and enclosure and all the horrors of primitive accumulation that have only accelerated since the emergence of the creature that is the capitalist mode of production, but woke) and all the correct token minorities are present and you can assume away hookworm and diabetes with the confidence of the bourgeois economist? What is the purpose of telling stories? You identify one trend: wish fulfillment. What other forms might a narrative take? What other ends might it serve? In order to imagine a better future we must first have an imagination. We develop it by engaging with the things other people have imagined. It's a social relation. All things are. Ideally, we have a grounding in history to inform our stories, and to direct our imaginations.

This is a lot of words to say that we need more fiction that imagines a better world not merely by assuming it and then flattering the reader for her enlightened perspective (there's a reason radlibs love YA lit). We need more good writing. I see the world transitioning into a post-literate society (at least those parts of it that were ever literate) and I wonder what narrative even looks like there. But nevertheless! Why should there be a contradiction between immersing yourself in the world and reading and writing? "Write what you know" is a dictum for a reason.

Surely there is a path forward. Perhaps it looks like already-existing speculative fiction. I doubt it does, for the reasons you've already outlined. Perhaps it is unrecognizable as such because the world it emerges from and imagines is so radically different from the speculative fiction whose shortcomings you identify. The only way to know is to try. Something something read Lenin something something I half remember there being a bit in Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder that's relevant here.

Do you have a video with the person dunking on the tankies are Calvinists thing? I don't understand what that means, but I've been hearing it a lot lately.