> Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
>>But I'd love to be persuaded
>>that it was still worth it, despite the outcome.
>
> What else could they have done? They had to act in the moment, and
> had no way of knowing how history would turn out in 1989. In many
> ways it was an excellent attempt; they industrialized the USSR,
> brought its social indicators up to near-Western levels - and as
> Putin said, its collapse was a great catastrophe. Much of the fSU
> outside Moscow is worse off than it was 16 years ago. And what was
> the counterfactual? Russia wasn't developing swimmingly before the
> revolution. And it's not like the birth of capitalism, or even its
> continued existence, was all that pretty a picture. I don't often
> find myself saying this, but don't be so pessimistic!
>
> Doug
-----------------------------------------
I understand this, and I did note, like you, that, "I think I would have
believed the same thing (as the Bolsheviks) at that time and in that place,
and that the opportunity had to be seized", in the not implausible
conviction that the world socialist revolution was at hand. But it turned
out not to be the case, and I don't think if the early Marxists had known
that their project would, in effect, be the forced industrialization of
Russia under Stalinist auspices leading to a capitalist restoration, that
they would have still proceeded as they did. I think they would have
grudgingly been forced to realign themselves with the Mensheviks with the
perspective of presiding over a transitional capitalist democracy in Russia
along the lines of Western Europe, until conditions for socialism "ripened"
further. This was the orientation not only of the Mensheviks, but also - up
to April, 1917 - of the Bolsheviks, as modified by Lenin's formula of the
"democratic dictatorship". So it isn't some far-fetched "counterfactual",
but one of two alternate courses the Bolsheviks actively considered during
that period. Whether the more cautious approach would have succeeded, or
given way like other shaky European democracies to fascism, is another
matter. But I do think the Bolsheviks would have abandoned their
perspectives of world socialist revolution, as the Western European and
other CP's were subsequently and tacitly forced to do, if they could have
foreseen the future back then. Of course, I know they couldn't have foreseen
it! And I admire their personal and political courage in making the attempt.
But that's not the point, nor is my other point of agreement with you that
things are now worse under capitalism for the mass of people in the former
Soviet Union.
The point I was trying to make - evidently not very successfully - is that the Revolution sparked a century of heroism and sacrifice by millions of people, who might not have made those sacrifices knowing how things turned out, including the "excellent attempt" - but ultimately a failed one - which you describe in the USSR. The volunteers who went to Spain, including a late relative of mine, Bill Gandall, have always seemed to me to be an exemplar of that magnificent tradition in the West. But I know my cousin didn't go to Spain in the expectation that the party and cause he was fighting for would be replaced by Yeltsin and Putin, or that the Trotskyists, whom he was taught to loath, would turn out to be right in what they were saying about Stalin, or that his Chinese comrades fighting with Mao in Yenan would eventually preside over their own capitalist restoration, or that the world working class would be much farther from socialism at the end of his century than at the beginning. He and millions of others wouldn't have been inspired to do what they did had they known that. Would you?
So I think this is a huge human tragedy, for which the building of the Moscow subway hardly compensates, and it should be acknowledged as such - without tears or sentimentality or a felt need to gild the lily. To charge me with the sin of "pessimism" (that old witchhunting canard on the left) for simply doing so seems to me out of character for you. I'm no more pessimistic than most on this list, and probably less so than many in that I don't consider the collapse of twentieth century socialism a result of some fixed laws of human nature or the marketplace, but simply a premature attempt to move humanity in a direction it doesn't yet seem ready to go at this stage of its development. I also wrote that there does not seem to be anything inherent in the nature of the modern white-collar workforce that would preclude it from responding to a systemic breakdown in the same way as their industrial working class predecessors, and that the lessons of the recent changes in the USSR and China show how "startling and swift revolutionary change can be". Doesn't sound like "pessimism" to me.
Marv