> There was a lot wrong with the USSR, but it was a good
> try, especially at the beginning, and it kept the U.S. in
> check. The world is, on balance, worse in its absence.
Allow me to second this. And while I agree with Nathan that it in the United States -- as with just about any country on earth -- it is the achievements of mass movements and not self-righteous little adventurist grouplets that deserve our respect, it is difficult to imagine that the mass movements of the twentieth century would have succeeded to the extent they did without the impact of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet presence. I'm not only talking here about the participation of communists in these movements, but of the ideological impact and real-life, scary material threat of the Soviet Union. Or in the case of the African-American upsurge of the 1950s and 1960s, the worldwide successes of national liberation movements, which themselves depended so critically on the Soviet counterweight.
Arguments like this seem specious to me:
> 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?
In fact, I am tempted to answer the first question "yes," the right would have been even more uninhibited in taking power. The orgy of repression unleashed by reaction on the world had an urgency only because the socialism had a prospect of *success.* It is impossible to imagine a situation in which the working class makes progress without running the risk of right-wing repression, and that holds true whether you're talking about the micro level (if you join a union, you might get fired) or the macro level (whole countries attempting to overthrow capitalism in the face of imperialist hostility). In these situations it is improper to lay blame for reactionary repression on socialists for "going too far." I am as humorless an opponent of idiotic adventurism as anyone else, but the revolutionaries of that time period were not insular, self-indulgent onanists like the Weather Underground; they were leaders of real mass movements with a real following, and they saw their chance and took it. That's why this is a utopian counterfactual:
> If I had the choice, I've take the February Revolution
> and the compromises of Kerensky, the Menshevics and
> the SRs in a more democratic Russia. I think the 20th
> Century would have been better off.
In the real world, such a situation was not possible, not least of all because Kerensky, the Mensheviks, et. al. made the cardinal mistake of misjudging a very grave situation, namely the First Word War. The Bolsheviks were right about that, and that made a huge difference. When the German communists were beaten back, their best leadership murdered, and the potential revolutionary wave subsided, the Bolsheviks found themselves in charge of a country (after a bloody civil war) with no revolutionary allies, and they then made what they could of that mess. My personal view is that a Bukharin-style approach would have been the best possible outcome in this situation, though there's also the fact that the country was later to be invaded by the fascists, and if the USSR hadn't prevailed against them, we'd all be speaking German, to coin a phrase.
Above all I agree with Doug that it's possible to agree to disagree on all of this. But those are my thoughts anyway. I regret they weren't very timely for the purposes of this discussion, which appears to be shutting down anyway, which it probably should.
- - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!