On Fri, 26 May 2000 18:29:00 -0700 Brad De Long
<delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU> writes:
> >
>
>
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> There was a third argument in _The Age of Extremes_: that the threat
> of really existing socialism eliminated wholesale repression of the
> working class as a possibility: because the political allegiance of
> the workers needed to be maintained, the only possible forms of
> regime in western Europe after World War II were mixed-economy
> social-democratic ones. This argument seemed to me to make no sense
> at all--for the existence of a really-existing-socialist alternative
> provokes a leftward move in politics in all those cases except when
> it doesn't. In Latin America and in South Asia, the existence of
> Communist regimes and threats after World War II fueled an
> authoritarian-fascist shift in politics. Only in western Europe did
> the Communist threat cause a few steps to be taken to the left. And
> Hobsbawm doesn't explain--doesn't understand--why the existence of
> really-existing-socialism had such widely divergent consequences in
> western Europe and elsewhere.
I wouldn't be so presumptous as to attempt to speak for Hobsbawm but didn't the existence of "really-existing" socialism in the USSR first have the effect of provoking a rightist trend in European politics during the '20s and '30s culminating in the rise of fascism? It was only after the destruction of those regimes in WW II and the reconstruction of bourgeois democratic regimes following the war that the ruling classes were forced to pay attention to the necessity of winning the allegiances of their working classes, hence the creation of social democracy in western Europe after the war or so it would seem to me.
Jim Farmelant
>
> Brad DeLong
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