> What is the dark corridor of the same old thing (on
> the left) ?
Gulags, repression of freedom of speech, fordism with a socialist face, bureaucratic control from above, etc. In other words, making an attempt at a better society only to end up a stalinist nightmare...That is one example
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Charles: So the Gulags and Stalinism are the nitemare , the Spectres, weighing on our brains. An even bigger nitemare is the giant monster that imperialism has become, from Nazism to nucs to Bushism to put down Marxism by force. But the thing is to learn from all these trials and errors of the dead generations of Marxists, as in the extraordinary 75 years of actual experience with building socialism, worth a thousand programs like the Paris Commune, nay a billion programmatic and theoretical brillances.
Also, it is a bit overly dramatic or exaggerated to go around a peace rally in 2001 and accuse the "Stalinists" of tending to repression and mass murder because of the way they organize the peace movement. Whoever you consider your political ancestors are not likely to have no mass murder in their history. You aren't an actual victim of Stalinism and the rally organizers are not actual mass murderers or tyrants. The notion that they have more of a tendency in that way than you is sort of smug (sorry) or something. Everybody has skeletons in their ideological history, including especially liberals and social democrats. Today's Workers World party members or others have just as much claim to politically pure morality as anybody else on the left or going to anti-war meetings. So can't we all just unite for peace today ?
Wasn't the VietNam war stopped ? Yes
Wasn't
> 1917 successful ?
Depends on your definition of successful. I do not consider the eventual results as succesful.
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Charles: Why ? The world revolution is not complete, but seems to me ,on total , the world is better off because of the Russian Revolution. What independence from imperialism that exists today and the promise that there is an alternative to capitalism comes from the fact that an alternative lasted so long in the SU and continues today in China, Korea, Viet Nam , Zimbabwe, Cuba, India, Laos et al.
Wouldn't Marx expect this world historic revolution to come in ebbs and flows, not a straight line ? We are only in an ebb . Surely a new and better socialism, learning from and because of the nitemare weighing on its brains, will rise in the future, no ? Would Marx be surprised that it takes more than five generations to bring in the new world ? In historically relative terms, the socialist revolution is still coming in faster than the bourgeois revolution did. These are epochal revolutions , which means multi-generational, more dead generations than living generations involved in the process.
===== "The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"
- -Karl Marx