Ex-USSR and China
Basic Strategy Document (Approved by the 7^th Congress of the FdCA, 2006)

The theoretical documents on the USSR and China as incorrect transitional forms to communism have been cancelled from our Basic Strategy. At the time these texts were written, the planned State model seemed to be quite efficient. On the one hand it was seen, by many struggle movements working within the capitalist system and by many national liberation movements in colonized countries, as a practical and ideological reference point known simply as Communism. On the other hand there were those (within the anarchist movement too) who, on the basis of the myth of an efficient, ever-present State, saw the Soviet model as a winning formula, one which could even impose its own rules on traditional capitalism. It therefore followed that the new social system in those countries living under “real communism” became the real, and only, enemy that had to be defeated. And to do that, it was necessary to debunk politically both the myth of “communism made flesh” and the supposed perfection of the class in power in those countries: the techno-bureaucracy.

Time has proved us right. The Soviet model imploded, for reasons that were principally economic, but also because the bureaucracy was unable to exert real control over the system. China is experimenting with a transition to capitalism in its wildest form, but without moving towards the political system of Western democracies, maintaining a rigid bureaucratic centralism. The techno-bureaucracy has not won and the Western techno-bureaucracy, which was supposed to become like the Soviet one, instead moved down the path of the more traditional history of the captains of industry and their class system. The myth of communism having actually been achieved (in places like the USSR, China, Albania, Cuba, etc.) is disappearing from the horizon of the class struggle (while at the same the class struggle itself is weak), being seen for what it really was: a new tool of oppression and exploitation.

Today, the political clarification that was necessary at the time no longer has the same vital significance, but the value in terms of research that these documents represented for anarchist communists in the development of a general political theory remains unchanged. They are not only of historical value. They represent the result of a method of analysis and an ideological formulation that remain current, a launch pad for new research to reveal the changing form that power can take without losing any of its characteristics.