On Sat, 27 May 2000 09:35:43 -0400 Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> writes:
> | ...
>
> 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).
All that is certainly correct but I think that you ignore the threat that the October Revolution posed to the legitimacy of bourgeois regimes in Europe. In the immediate post-WW I era, worker uprisings broke out in a number of European countries including most notably Germany, Hungary, and Italy. They were all eventually crushed but left a profound sense of unease among the ruling classes, hence the appeal of fascism to them later on.
>
> 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.
>
That is certainly true but it ignores the fact that strong Communist parties developed in at least several western European countries including France and Italy. The fact that the former USSR was no utopia does not gainsay the fact that it was seen by millions of people back then as demonstrating the possibility of a noncapitalist alternative, and that fact had to be taken into account by the ruling classes when they found it necessary to concern themselves with the political allegiances of the working classes.
Jim F.
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