From one of my favorite passages from H&N’s corpus, found late in _Labor of Dionysus_:

” ‘Real Socialism’–that is, the socialism that actually existed in the Soviet Union and other coutries in Eastern Europe–did not constitute a form of government substantially different than the form invented by capitalism in the course of its development. Or more precisely, its form was only different inasmuch as it was applied to a phase of capitalist development different than that goverened by the capitalist democracies….From the persepective of capitalist development, real socialism was a success: it brought an immense region of the world that waited at the edges of economic development toward the center of the “postindustrial” world and it imposed an extrordinary acceleration on the construction of the world market. One of the major effects of the rise and fall of real socialism, then, was the progresive narrowing of the gap between East and West.

This economic development, we should be clear, certainly brought with it heavy social damages. Alexandar Solzhenitsyn was perfectly right to critize the gulag system of the Satlinist Soviet Union when he did so from the point of view of the most radical anticapitalism and reactionary humanism. On the other hand, those who hold capitalist development as the only possible form of economic and political civilization cannot condemn the gulag in any absolute way. When they do criticize it, in fact, the apologists of captitalism risk conducting an enormous historical whitewash, forgetting both the history of capitalist accumulation and the present gulags of exploitation and segregation, the remains of Vietnam and Iraq, and the terrible desolate spaces of continents ravaged by the effects of capitalist development.”

–H&N, “Potentialities of a Constitutent Power” in _Labor of Dionysus_, 263-64.