> On Mar 7, 2010, at 3:42 PM, Bhaskar Sunkara wrote:
>
>> You're asserting that
>> without October there is no Swedish social democracy?
>
> [...]
>
> You also have to wonder what the course of the civil rights movement
> in the U.S. would have been if the U.S. ruling class hadn't been
> afraid of competition with the USSR in the Third World.
There's a book on that: http://mdudziak.com/cwcr.aspx
I don't think the example holds up for the Swedish case, though. There were few European countries where Soviet communism held less attraction on the left. It was precisely the countries where the threat of a Soviet-style revolution was the most real - France and Italy - that social democracy was tardiest and most incomplete. The Soviet threat had very little to do with the success of western social democracy and overall may have hampered it.
SA