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By Gary Wilson

The same hand reaches from West Asia to the Donbass, hunting oil, gas, minerals, grain, markets and control over the channels of finance. In an April 2026 speech in Washington, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte called Europe “a power projection platform for the United States.” The bases that launched Washington’s war on Iran and the rearmament aimed at Russia are one machine. European workers are being lined up behind a war against Russia, while Ukrainian workers are used as cannon fodder for a NATO project that enriches the monopolies.

The recurrent debates about whether the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, or any state in the process of developing socialism is/was a worker’s state or just an elite-ruled authoritarian state represent a mode of thinking that tries to fit the real world into a preconceived ideal. One imagines a socialist society and contrasts the problematic reality of building socialism with utopia. No matter how impressive progress is, it will always remain below expectations.

Anti-imperialist strategy must contain an actually existing counter-hegemonic force capable of challenging the dominant power structure. Western Marxists are often trapped in a utopian world where the idea of socialism is superior to the transitional regimes and modes of production—many of which have emerged in the past hundred years, struggling against a dominant capitalist world system. The Brazilian communist Jones Manoel writes:

Nothing is socialist transition, and everything is state capitalism…The contradictions, the problems, the failures, the mistakes, sometimes even the crimes, mainly happen during this moment of building the new order. So, when the time comes to evaluate the building of a new social order—which is where, apparently, the practice always appears to stray from the purity of theory—the specific appears corrupted in the face of the universal.

The transition from capitalism to socialism will be a long process. The transition to capitalism was a process that took centuries, from the Italian city-states, to the Dutch Empire, to the breakthrough of industrial capitalism in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since capitalism developed globally, the transition towards socialism is also global. But not a simultaneous transformation; the transition contains many revolutions. The balance between capitalism and socialism has tilted back and forth since the mid-nineteenth century. The dialectical relationship between economic laws and class struggle creates tendencies and counter-tendencies, which interact with one another.

This transformational process has also contained socialist movements and states. Movements are a first step towards state power, but they are also a transformative power in themselves, changing our norms and values, as seen in the 1968 rebellion.

This process of transformation takes place within the framework of the world system of states. Although the economy of capitalism is transnational, its political system is divided into nation-states. The nation-state is thus an inevitable factor in the transformation from capitalism to socialism. We need the power of the state to defend the socialist project in a hostile world system.

Throughout the 20th century, there were several attempts to develop socialism within the framework of the nation-state, which inevitably clashed with the surrounding capitalist world. To defend their project, these states have been caught in the dilemma between supporting the world revolution, which in the long run is necessary for the success of building socialism, and the need to survive in the shorter run—exemplified by the Soviet strategy of “socialism in one country.” Historical periods do not follow one another in a clear-cut manner; they interpenetrate and combine over a long period. In the long transition from capitalism, different forms of “socialism under construction” have and will appear according to the different histories, cultures, and positions of each country in the world-system. As Engels put it in 1890:

So-called “socialist society” is not, in my view, to be regarded as something that remains crystallized for all time, but rather in the process of constant change and transformation like all other social conditions.

Instead of seeing each attempt to build socialism in the past two hundred years as mistakes, I see them as steps in a long transitional process. These steps have contributed to the transition by changing capitalism, and have acted as learning-processes for the forces of socialism. As we see advances and retreats, we must evaluate them in the context of the different stages of capitalist development.

The crises in capitalism occur when the development of the productive forces is blocked by the mode of production. The driver of the transition process is the class struggle, initiated by exploitation, which is necessary for the continued accumulation of capital. However, until now, capitalism has been able to solve the contradiction within the system. It has adapted—and rolled back attempts—to the construction of socialism. Thus, transition is a process of trial and error, and of trying again. Communism is a practical struggle with a bevy of trials containing the praxis of past revolutions from which we can learn.

'Not What You Saw' [2024-ongoing] by Keerthana Kunnath

Shot across beaches, fields, and village edges in Kerala, India,

"Man Conquers the Cosmos", mosaic in Potsdam created by Fritz Eisel, 1972.