Yeah, Parenti refers to this as siege socialism and admonishes other leftists who engage in red bashing and regurgitate orthodox capitalist propaganda without taking into account the context and conditions that require a more iron-fisted approach to survive. Looking at you Chomsky.

But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the work­ers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this "pure socialism" view is ahistorical and nonfalsi­fiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It com­pares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage. The pure socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be av oided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priori­ties set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed