> From: Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca>
>
> History having unfortunately shown that the masses are not always or even
> mostly able to link their economic interests to their political ones, it's
> also likely that in their disappointment with the administration, they
> would
> return to the Republicans, who would be seconding their complaints against
> the Democrats while keeping their own plans to reduce or eliminate
> government spending programs under wraps until after the election.
>
> This is particularly so given the absence of any mass party to the left or
> sizeable and coherent left opposition within the DP articulating the need
> of
> the population for higher levels of public spending.
>
>
> [WS:] Very true. However, institutional presence of left wing parties
> does not seem to help much during the times of crisis. EU countries and
> Israel are a case in point. They tend to support center-right parties
> more than left-wing parties during crises (albeit what is center-right in
> EU would be center-left in the US.)
>
> This is indeed puzzling, given the mass-support the left used to receive
> in crisis situations (in the first half of the 20th century.) Why does
> not history repeat itself, even as farce? My explanation is that mass
> left wing/communist movement had its roots in rural societies, which made
> such form of mass mobilization possible (a view held by social historians
> like Barrington Moore, Jeffrey Paige, Chalmers Johnson, and Alexander
> Gerschenkron) - and those social conditions do not exist anymore.
>
> To make a long story short - communism as political ideology had a strong
> appeal to rural masses turned industrial proletariat, because it provided
> them with a sense of solidarity that they lost in the process of becoming
> proletariat as a class rather than individually of course.) That longing
> for rural-type solidarity was evidenced by popularity of utopian socialism
> or the kibbutz movement around the turn of the century. Communism (which
> as Kolakowski argues had well pronounced elements of x-tian eschatology)
> was yet another millenary movement that emerged in the rural societies
> during the times of crises and social change. Gerschenkron argues that
> Soviet leaders used a watered-down version of communist ideology to appeal
> to Russian peasant communalism in order to mobilize popular support (in
> other words, their tru goal was modernization and industrialization rather
> than building a "communist" society, whatever that was, and a "communist"
> ideology
> they adopted played a function similar to Obama's "hope" schtick.)
>
> However, ideals of social solidarity entailed by the 20th century
> communism had rather limited appeal to modern, predominantly urban working
> class. This can be evidenced, inter alia, by the visible decline of the
> kibbutz movement. I would also argue that this is the cause of waning
> popular support for communist parties. To urban working classes, a far
> more appealing was the idea of welfare state grounded in Keynesianism and
> social-democracy.
>
[...]
================================================
Appreciate your thoughtful comments. In retrospect, the Soviet and Chinese
regimes were successful in fulfilling "the historic tasks of the
bourgeois-democratic revolution" - ie. land reform, industrialization, mass
education, public health, national independence, etc. - but could not build
an enduring socialist (publicly owned and controlled) economy in
predominantly rural societies encircled by more advanced capitalist
economies enjoying higher levels of labour productivity.
Lenin correctly (IMO) anticipated this in his early call for a "democratic" rather than "proletarian", capitalist rather than socialist, state led jointly by workers' and peasants' parties to replace the Tsarist autocracy based on the landlords. This was in deference to the social weight of the peasantry and the relatively underdeveloped state of the economy and culture. It was only in 1917 that he aligned himself with Trotsky's theory that a "permanent" working-class led socialist revolution was possible in Russia because it would quickly spread to the West and provide the infant socialisrt republic with the resources it needed to survive and prosper. Lenin's April theses encouraged the Bolsheviks to take power on that basis in the name of the Soviets. It was a bold and not unreasonable policy at the time, given the European-wide revolutionary ferment, but it was, as we now know, historically doomed.
I don't think socialism had little appeal to the Western workers because they were and are somehow inherently lacking in "ideals of social solidarity". They found the capitalist welfare state more attractive because, plain and simple, it delivered a higher standard of living to them than was evident in anticapitalist China and the USSR undergoing rigourous industrialization. There was therefore a real materialist underpinning to the social democratic ideology of the Western working class. Even so, except in the wealthiest English-speaking capitalist countries, the Communist parties were still able to sink deep roots in Western urban centres from the time of the Russian Revolution until it's demise seven decades later. Because of this relationship between the material and the ideological, it would not surprise me to see radical left-wing ideas revive if the economic underpinnings of Western working class consciousness - underpinnings which has been weakened over the past several decades - were to thoroughly collapse.