I would certainly agree that many of these movements were inspired by the USSR and I have a profound respect for the Party organizers who risked (and in certain cases, gave up) their lives to try to create a radically new society. But it was U.S. workers who shut down the factories of Detroit, who shut down the cities of Minneapolis and San Francisco. Some of these women and men were inspired by the imaginary of the USSR, but not all of them. And in many cases, that imagination was far more powerful than the actuality of the Soviet dictatorship. As Negri notes about his grandfather, "He had grown up with the myth of Russian communism." (Think Sorel, Gramsci, etc.) Beyond that, the social democracy imagined in the workplaces of the United States, in Spain, etc. was far more participatory than the structures of the vanguard party and the reformist party of the social democrats.
The countersystemic structures that coagulated in 1968 were in opposition to the Soviet acceptance of U.S. hegemony as much as they were to the U.S. (well, not quite... look at Wallerstein in particular for this discussion). The Civil Rights, anti-war, SDS movements were once again defined by the willingness of large amounts of people to put themselves on the line to destroy the old system. This expands as we look at the world system. We can see the same thing happening right now in disparate manners in places ranging from Lebanon to Venezuela. These movements have less and less relationship to the USSR, but managed to nonetheless create large effects.
Last, I would certainly recognize that the USSR was a large funder of countersystemic movements, but it would be a mistake to ignore the ambiguities in that funding. The demands on the CPUSA on the part of the Soviet party was certainly one of the causes of its collapse (the radical shifts dependent on the needs of the Soviet leadership, rather than the indigenous party) This is actually fairly minor compared to the acts of the party in say Spain and Germany before the second world war. One can also look at the difficulties the NLF in Vietnam went through with the funding from the Soviet Union, as well as the FSLN in Nicaragua.
robert wood
^^^^^^ CB: Lets say you or Trotsky or Bukharin had defeated Stalin in the internal party struggles. What would you have done differently over those 70 years or so ? How exactly would you have not accepted U.S. hegemony ?