farmelantj at juno.com:
> 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.
It was my impression that the Welfare State a.k.a. "social democracy" was invented and began to be implemented by such as Bismarck in the 19th century, not the 20th century, and that its purpose was to preempt or coopt not foreign but domestic socialists (the New Deal in the '30s being the last of a considerable series).
It seems to me the Soviet Union assisted working-class people in the West by providing, or being usable as an excuse to provide, an almost continuous state of near-war, thus driving up the demand for and so the price of labor. It fell a little bit short as an example of utopia.