The following article is a response to “Contested legacies, possible futures” by Herman Rosenfeld, published in Canadian Dimension on January 5, 2026.

I thank Herman Rosenfeld for writing his long review of my Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left in an appreciative and comradely tone in spite of what he rightly calls his “substantial disagreements” with some of its arguments. Rather than engage with those disagreements, I’d like to clarify a few points, particularly regarding certain views that Rosenfeld mistakenly imputes to me.

The main thrust of Red Flags’ analysis of the USSR from 1928-1991, China from 1949 until the end of the 1970s, and Cuba from 1959 to the present is that these “Actually Existing Socialist” (AES) countries were class societies in which the central political bureaucracy of the party-state was a ruling class that exploited the direct producers. Rosenfeld gives short shrift to the book’s crucial argument that AES countries were class societies that were not in transition toward communism, focusing instead on the secondary argument about how to characterize their socio-economic nature (in my........

© Canadian Dimension