[lbo-talk] Cultural Change?

[Nathan Newman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Todd Archer" <todda39 at hotmail.com>
>Big counterfactuals there.  Without the Soviet Union, would rightwing
>fascists and McCarthyites have been able to gain so much power around the
>world?  Might Debs Socialists have survived intact from the 1910s without
>the full-on onslaught of the Red Scare and the divisiveness of its internal
>divisions? Would Hitler have won power without the German Communists making
>the country ungovernable and dividing the left?

-And Nathan: so by your lights, the commies and other leftists shouldn't
even
-have tried as hard as they did for fear of fascism and strongmen?
>Now I'm just waiting for some comment from you about rape
>and women who wear sexy dresses . . . .

The difference between pretty dresses and gulags is that I think pretty
dresses don't harm anyone else.  Gulags and proletarian dictatorships aren't
"trying hard" but perverting socialist values.  I'm not arguing the early
Bolsheviks were all bad, just that they betrayed a lot of principles of
socialism and thereby helped justify the backlash against the democratic
left.

And on the broader point, if you fuckup by pushing too hard and the result
is worse than if you had moderated demands and gotten more, than you
shouldn't "try so hard."  Stupid unstrategic militancy is nothing to praise.
Give me actual social progress any day.

Nathan Newman