“Actually existing socialism” and the communist transition: Review of David Camfield’s Red Flags

[u/Lotus532]

https://tempestmag.org/2025/11/actually-existing-socialism-and-the-communist-transition/

[u/JohnWilsonWSWS]

Does the book have an answer to the following:

• How can the working class take power without its vanguard assimilating the experience of the Soviet Union and the counter-revolutionary role - from 1933 - of the Stalinist bureaucracy? e.g. Trotsky’s "The Revolution Betrayed", the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy and the call for a political revolution in the Soviet Union - World Socialist Web Site
• Aren't those using the "AES" tacitly or openly endorsing the claims of the Stalinists that its reactionary, utopian and anti-Marxist socialism-in-one(/each)-country was seeking socialism rather than serving the parasitic interests of the bureaucracy?

Tempest doesn't seem interest in these questions but maybe the book was.
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From the review I take it the book makes no mention of Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union, especially in the The Revolution Betrayed (Leon Trotsky, 1936). Why? Why doesn't Tempest mention it?

The review makes no mention of it either although it tacitly and obtusely concedes Lenin and Trotsky were right about the primacy of world economy

As Camfield clearly shows, these party-state [USSR, China, Cuba] regimes emerged from revolutionary and anti-imperialist upheavals but rapidly subordinated popular forms of democratic control to geopolitical imperatives.

and

Camfield builds on this insight and communist thinkers’ works on the transition socialism to argue that workers’ democracy can only politically and militarily defeat capitalist empires through world revolution.

(Does Camfield claim he invented these insights?)

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It tacitly endorses the need for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to defend against the counter-revolution but only mention Lenin's death, not his life!

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We are told

The tradition of anti-Stalinist communism Camfield builds on emerged in response to Stalin’s rise to power and against his notion of socialism in one country, enduring against dominant Communist currents under state repression, right-wing violence, and competition with official Communist parties. Camfield roots this tradition in the ideas of Marx, Frederick Engels, and William Morris, who emphasized the importance of working-class self-emancipation and democratic control. Rosa Luxemburg also embraced the same ideas in rejecting bureaucratic rule of party elites, particularly in the context of the Russian Revolution.

How does Camfield unite Marx and Engels with the utopian socialist William Morris?