[WS:] I am with you 100% on that. However, the most obvious lesson from those victories, as well as that from the Soviet experience, that the state is the most powerful weapon that the working class ever had against the capital, seems to be largely lost today. It is quite telling that when the issue of working class struggle was brought up, the only examples of that struggle mentioned were strikes and trade unionism. If memory serves, the limits of that strategy were already exposed by Lenin over 100 years ago ("What is to be done") - so counting on industrial action alone seems like moving the clock back to the 19th century.
I can certainly understand disappointment with the performance of the nominally labor or socialist parties in Europe (I do not even consider Democrats in this league because they are neither, not even close) - but there are other institutional solutions possible that do not necessarily rely on partisan politics and elections. One example is "A Modest Proposal for Overcoming the Euro Crisis" by Yanis Varoufakis - which Doug posted to this list and which I read with great interest. The proposal was dismissed by the "professional radical left," which does not surprise me, because theirs is a form of religion - if you do not go to heaven my way, you will not get there at all - or ours is god-given everyone else's is man made.
However, the obvious lesson from that proposal is that institutional solutions that benefit working class internationally (at least within the EU) are not possible, but also likely to be supported by state administrators fearing a breakup of institutional order.
Keep it in mind that this was precisely the mechanism that led to the victories of the working class in 20th century Europe. State administrators - including Sweden - were a major force pushing for institutional social protection mechanisms demanded by labor because they felt it was necessary to prevent breakups of the institutional order. That point is made quite convincingly by Evans, Rueschemeyer & Skocpol ("Bringing the state back in") see also Flora & Heidenheimer ("The development of welfare states in Europe and America") for those interested in bibliographical references.
Furthermore, "revolutions from above" (cf. Kay Timberger's book by that title) i.e cadres of technocrats capturing the state and using its power to crush the entrenched elite class interests have a higher rate of success
(cf. Japan, Brazil, Turkey, Taiwan) than "revolutions from below" (prime modern examples of which being the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia, or the unsuccessful Mau Mau uprising in Kenya.) Therefore, the elite class opposition to his "modest proposal" that Varoufakis mentioned can be effectively crushed by the state.
So if one is to learn from history, the obvious lesson is that the state is not only the key to the labor's victory against the current capitalist onslaught but also it is the only key - there is no other alternative. And this is the reality, the objections and delusions of the professional American state haters and gutter populists notwithstanding.
Wojtek