It’s quite long, but I recommend this talk by Vijay Prashad where he talks about, among various topics, the effects of the fall of the Soviet Union on various communist parties around the world (the first five minutes or so are an introduction that you can skip).
In short, by the time of the fall of the USSR and other Eastern European communist nations, communist movements in the rest of the world had already diverged and begun forging their own paths. In India for instance, the communist party had already split over the notion the USSR was too ‘paternalistic’ and didactic - that while it had an incredibly valuable role both as the first socialist nation in existence and as a supporter of communist movements internationally, it shouldn’t try to assert to communist movements in other parts of the world what their programmes should be. So by forging their own path based on their own conditions, other movements ‘survived’ the fall of the USSR by simply focusing on continuing to fight their local battles.
However, as Vijay Prashad also says, in the west the left collapsed totally. Every social-democratic party, such as the Labour party in the UK, totally surrendered to neoliberal capitalism and just positioned themselves as better at steering the boat than their further-right opponents. Mainstream western “leftists”, even some so-called communist parties, are mired in condemnations of both historical socialist states and current anti-imperialist movements, as well as being infested with reactionary brainworms (transphobia, “anti-woke” etc.) So in that regard, in the west they didn’t keep optimistic.
When you reference movements in the USA, does your critical description apply to the PSL and FRSO also?
I am not familiar enough with them to give a confident answer, but I’ve heard good things about them - however the PSL was founded in 2004, or at least split off from the WWP then, so I would say it represents the very beginnings of the long-term shift back towards entertaining socialism as a viable project in the west. The FRSO I’m afraid I know nothing about.
In my criticism I was specifically thinking of parties like CPUSA, which has a completely revisionist, opportunist leadership that has basically denounced Marxism and supports the US Empire, or the Communist Party of Britain which (true to the nature of TERF Island) is infested with transphobes and are, again, revisionist opportunists who think they can simply take over the bourgeoise parliament and introduce socialism that way.
Not being on twitter helps a truck-load. “There is no problem that can’t be solved by getting off twitter”
“There is no problem that can’t be solved by getting off twitter”
Wise words indeed. Confucius quote?
Probably. Sounds like something he would say.
Because we are right. And history will prove it
If you stop following the liberal constant redefinition of words, then you can see that Communism had never failed from the beginning and even gain success that Capitalist stole.
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Well, “many” is an overstatement. Half the world was socialist and now there there is only 5 AES states.
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China is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in that population count though. Vietnam is the only other country with a meaningful population compared to China, especially when compared to countries like Cuba, North Korea, and Laos that are barely rounding errors compared to China.
I won’t fret much on that but on the other hand, we should wish to make not only more progressive and AES countries, but preferably Anglophone AES that’ll live long enough to expose and roast the image of the West directly…
