> I'm sadly compelled to agree with you. The problem I have with NLR is
> that,
> when the Soviet Union was collapsing, many of them thought not only that
> the
> collapse was inevitable (which it probably was), but that it was a good
> thing.
> For instance, Tariq Ali's 1988 book, "Revolution from Above" is dedicated
> to
> two Borises: Kagarlitsky and Yeltsin. He has since offered no reappraisal
> that I
> know of. As for Hobsbawm (who was an adviser to Neil Kinnock when he was
> purging Labor Militant), all his vast and impressive erudition seem to
> have led
> him to the conclusion that Communism was chimerical to begin with, and
> that the
> 20th century couldn't have turned out other than the way it did.
Well, it's interesting to speculate in retrospect whether it was in fact "chimerical" . The Bolsheviks took power and justified it on grounds not only that it would bring the Soviet peoples peace, land, and bread, but that it would trigger a world revolution, led by the industrial proletariat in the Western European nations. The internationalist motivation was the stronger of the two; both Lenin and Trotsky argued that the Russian Revolution was doomed if it remained isolated. I think I would have believed the same thing at that time and in that place, and that the opportunity had to be seized. Later, Trotsky described the revolution as strangled by Stalin, it's "gravedigger." Even those who saw the revolution as betrayed and degenerated expected it would be eventually restored to health by a resurgent Soviet working class bent on fusing public ownership and workers democracy. Hence, Tariq Ali's hopeful 1988 book. But a year or so later, the USSR proved to be an historically short-lived experiment, and the Russian workers, "tired of being social guinea pigs", rejected the socialist democracy "third way" urged on them by Ali and other Western intellectuals, and wearily acquiesced to a capitalist restoration. The Chinese and other twentieth century anticapitalist experiments, save for Cuba so far, experienced the same fate. It was simply not supposed to turn out this way, despite hints by Trotsky and others that it might, which many of us read more as a statement of alarm than a serious prediction.
So...if Lenin and his party could have foreseen the result, would they have still seized power? Unless you think they were romantics who would have wanted several generations of Soviet workers to be martyrs to what they knew was ultimately a doomed cause, you have to think they would have shunned embarking on such a course as "adventurist". But I'd love to be persuaded that it was still worth it, despite the outcome. It would no small comfort to think that the tens of millions who dreamed and struggled and were imprisoned, tortured, blacklisted, starved, and shot for their ideals - sacrifices fueled by their belief that a better world was not only desirable, but certain and imminent - were not victims of an monumental historic illusion. Until then, the only (very small) comfort I have is Chou's dictum that it's still too early, after all, by historical standards to even pass judgement on the 1789 French Revolution.
> The main question in my view, however, is exactly how we should readjust
> our
> perspectives. The typical reaction of many disappointed Marxists is that
> we
> should set our sights lower, on piecemeal reforms rather than revolution.
Do we have any choice in the matter? By all means, let's not be satisfied with piecemeal reforms and set our sights on revolution - if that's the nature of the period. At least, the Bolsheviks could plausibly argue conditions were ripe: massive war weariness in all countries, mutinies in the armies and navies of all of the contending powers, factory occupations by workers and land seizures by peasants, and a powerful and growing labour movement imbued with socialist ideas and organized in mass socialist parties.
No need to add the obvious: that these preconditions aren't present in the US or elsewhere. There are still some among us who like to describe themselves as revolutionaries, but we're all reformists now. We may set our sights on socialism, but in the absence of socialist parties struggling to overthrow capitalism and replace it with public ownership, where one's allegiance is only to an ideal rather than to a living mass movement, such a commitment is what Marx called it: utopian, which in itself is not bad, only harmless. Of necessity, the only activity open to us is "reformist" in the sense that such gains as occur can only occur within, and not outside, the framework of the system, whether it is withdrawal from Iraq or any of the myriad demands of the social movements. That is, of course, not to suggest that those gains aren't worth fighting for.
It's been like this for a long time, at least in the West. The last time there was a mass following for revolutionary politics was during the Great Depression. It required the historic changes in the USSR and China to definitively register the end of what had been the great worldwide ideological struggle of the twentieth century: between socialism (public ownership) and liberalism (regulated capitalism). Now it seems we've effectively been thrown back a century or two, and the struggle is between liberalism and a previously marginalized but now resurgent conservatism. I think that explains the phenomenon of so many people who would describe themselves as socialists "holding their noses" and voting Kerry against Bush - intuitively and by default in most cases. They simply had nowhere else to go. The international socialist movement and states with which they had identified since the 60's had simply evaporated, and the left-liberalism of Nader-Camejo did not seem noticeably less marginal than the vanguardist sects. The issues which engage us today do not concern ownership of the economy in whole or in part, as they once did. They are mostly about social and cultural issues and improving - or rather defending - our living standards and working conditions under capitalism. People still continue to call themselves socialist because they either a) confuse the term with a more humane and democratic capitalism, or b) because they haven't fully absorbed that the movement has disappeared from the historical stage.
Which is not to say it won't reappear in recognizable form or in some other guise one day. It's ahistoric to think that in the long sweep of things there won't be mass revolutionary upheavals. Probably not in our lifetime, although we did see only recently, in the case of the USSR and China, how startling and swift revolutionary change can be. If the period should become revolutionary, then so likely will many of us - again of necessity and probably reluctantly, when our friends and neighbours and those closest to us start losing their economic and physical security, and when and if becomes apparent that, unlike during the Depression, capitalism is unable to resolve the crisis. "Reformist" and "revolutionary" are dynamic rather than static concepts, so we shouldn't get too attached to them in our own case or that of others. People gravitate from one to the other and back again, depending on the conjuncture. That's, in fact, the political biography of most people who were active in the 30's and 60's. So it is not, IMO, a matter of how we "readjust our perspectives" in a vacuum, but how circumstances readjust them for us. "People make their own history, but not in circumstances of their choosing", and so on.
> I also think there is problem apart from Soviet collapse, and its effects
> on
> popular consciousness, namely, the fact that what Marxists always regarded
> as
> the main revolutionary agency, the industrial working class, is becoming a
> diminishing quantity in the advanced countries, and fragmented and
> incohate in
> the areas to which globalization is relocating it.
You point to an important issue - whether socialism was just an historical moment, coinciding with the rise of the industrial working class, or is something more enduring which will reappear the next time there is a social crisis. I've wondered about this myself, but still believe it is an emanation of the social relations under capitalism, and if the system fails, you will get the same response from retail, administrative, technical and professional wage earners as you got from preceding generations of craft and industrial workers. It's more difficult, IMO, to unionize the new working class because they are not concentrated in factories and mine and mill towns or as superexploited as the earlier generations - the result of more dispersed and irregular forms of work organization in a service economy and a long period of rising or stable living standards - but if they should suddenly be deprived of their work and if their living standards collapse, I don't see why their consciousness and activities would not conform to the changed circumstances as in the case of their predecessors. Certainly, whatever experience I've had with unionized industrial, service, technical, and even professional workers has persuaded me they are more alike than different in the way they behave collectively in the workplace and the political arena.
> So, given all this, can't you understand why the problem of perspective
> readjustment has become far too daunting for many? Isn't it easier to
> pretend that
> things haven't really changed, or that the entire enterprise of developing
> broad theortical perspectives is misguided, or that resistance is being
> carried
> on spontaneously by an ill-defined "multitude," for whom a choice of
> toothpaste brands can be an act of resistance comparable to a general
> strike? (A little
> polemical exaggeration here, but you get the idea.)
>
> Jim
Yes, I certainly do. Thanks for the comments.
Marv Gandall