Western Welfare State, the Great Reversal, anti-Stalinist intellectuals and their disgrace

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Sun, 2016-01-03 16:45

ikosmos

The Western Welfare State: Its Rise and Demise and the Soviet Bloc

How the hell did I miss this brilliant piece? I dunno, but glad I found it. It's from 2012.

It's got to be the best pummelling of the so-called "anti-Stalinist left" I've ever read. I mean a serious can 'o whup ass.

Quote:
There are two lines of inquiry which need to be elucidated in order to come to terms with the demise of the welfare state and the massive decline of living standards. One line of analysis examines the profound change in the international environment: We have moved from a competitive bi-polar system, based on a rivalry between the collectivist – welfare states of the Eastern bloc and the capitalist states of Europe and North America to an international system monopolized by competing capitalist states.

A second line of inquiry directs us to examine the changes in the internal social relations of the capitalist states: namely the shift from intense class struggles to long-term class collaboration, as the organizing principle in the relation between labor and capital.

further

Petras: "The main proposition informing this essay is that the emergence of the welfare state was a historical outcome of a period when there were high levels of competition between collectivist welfarism and capitalism and when class-struggle oriented trade unions and social movements had ascendancy over class-collaborationist organizations."

OK, the main ideas aside - and they are important ideas, to be looked at carefully - this piece is just a brilliant bit of polemic. I mean a shit-kicking.

Quote:
Western Left and Liberal intellectuals played a vital role in obfuscating the important positive role which Soviet welfarism had in pressuring the capitalist regimes of the West to follow their lead. Instead, during the decades following the death of Stalin and as Soviet society evolved toward a hybrid system of authoritarian welfarism, these intellectuals continued to refer to these regimes as ‘Stalinist’, obscuring the principle source of legitimacy among their citizens – their advanced welfare system. The same intellectuals would claim that the ‘Stalinist system’ was an obstacle to socialism and turned the workers against its positive aspects as a welfare state, by their exclusive focus on the past ‘Gulag’. They argued that the ‘demise of Stalinism’ would provide a great opening for ‘democratic revolutionary socialism’. In reality, the fall of collectivist-welfarism led to the catastrophic destruction of the welfare state in both the East and West and the ascendancy of the most virulent forms of primitive neo-liberal capitalism

There's much more and it's all good.

Sun, 2016-01-03 18:43

lagatta

Yeccch. You and the NATO fans should be locked in a room and have it out against each other. Petras is a Stalinist shill. And no, I'm not a whit fonder of NATO or Wall Street shills, and the dictatorships their side supported and supports.

Fri, 2016-01-15 01:52

ikosmos

There is a school of thought in the West that seems to dominate discussion of the Soviet period ... in which it is assumed that nothing of value whatsoever came out of that period. Ziltch. The idea isn't even examined critically for one second.That a bad socialism could have a positive influence simply cannot be conceptualized from this point of view.

Needless to say, I think this view should be rejected. It throws the socialist baby out with the Stalinist bath water.

There is also carry over to the present conservative regime in Russia today. It's treated as essentially identical to the Stalinist Soviet regime. Stalin is the explanation for current Russian foreign policy, which is bad. Stalin is the explanation for aspects of domestic Russian policy. And so on. It's completely unexamined much as above.

Such views lead to treating the foreign policy of the US and its NATO satellites as "no better or worse" than the fp of other states like Russia, China, etc. This is one of the key reasons why the peace movement is so morbid in Canada and North America generally - the whole conceptualization of what is "wrong" with inter. affairs and what needs to be done is so wrong headed, so hopelessly obsequious to the US regime, that the movement is ideologically de-motivated before it is energized.

The main proposition of Petras, aside from his polemic which rubs some the wrong way, about the positive influence of the Sov regime on the quality of life in Western countries has been pointed out by many others, and some long ago, before him. What he's saying in this regard is nothing new.

A number of Marxists have noted over the last century and a half how early theorists of capitalism either lauded its greatness (pro capitalist) or denounced its failings (early socialist critics) while both failing to see how there was an objective side to capitalist development. That's what we have to do with the Stalin era, and the Soviet period generally. And I believe we can do that without lauding tyrants or being shills for "Uncle Joe".

Tue, 2016-01-19 01:45

Ken Burch

The Warsaw Pact states(and the Soviet Union itself) could have preserved and expanded the social wage components of their societies without using any of the repressive or brutal methods they employed in the name of "state security".

There was never any justification for closed borders. Or using Soviet troops in stationed in the Pact states to repress the local population rather than simply to stand guard against Western military intervention. Or the complete suppression of freedom of expression and any expressions of dissent. Or the persecution of writers and artists, LGBTQ people, Roma/Sindhu people, and feminists.

And there was no way to defend those states without ending up implicitly defending all of the above.

The point of socialism and communism as ideals is to create something that is always, in all respects, better than capitalism...not just to win a geopolitical battle for the socialist or communist "side". Or to keep the Party in power just for the sake of keeping it in power.

Stalinism died a well-deserved death in 1989. There was no decent or humanistic way to have prevented that death. And all forms of the Left, to this day, are still struggling to recover from the damage "actually existing socialism" did to our great and still-righteous and heroic cause.

Nothing would be better today for the left if we had spent the post-1945 era defending things like the crushing of the left-wing socialist revolt in East Berlin in 1953, or the Soviet invasion of independent left-socialist Hungary in 1956(and the subsuquent crushing of reform communism in Poland in 1958) OR the "Warsaw Pact intervention" in Czechslovakia in 1968, or the existence of the gulags. All of that was a total and completely indefensible betrayal of everything Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and the other true keepers of the liberation flame ever stood for.

And the triumph of neoliberalism would have been just as complete if "actually existing socialism" had somehow beem unnaturally preserved.

Tue, 2016-01-19 06:36

Left Turn

Ken Burch wrote:
The Warsaw Pact states(and the Soviet Union itself) could have preserved and expanded the social wage components of their societies without using any of the repressive or brutal methods they employed in the name of "state security".

There was never any justification for closed borders. Or using Soviet troops in stationed in the Pact states to repress the local population rather than simply to stand guard against Western military intervention. Or the complete suppression of freedom of expression and any expressions of dissent. Or the persecution of writers and artists, LGBTQ people, Roma/Sindhu people, and feminists.

And there was no way to defend those states without ending up implicitly defending all of the above.

I'm in agreement with the above, and I won't defend the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the way that James Petras does. At the same time, I find a good degree of validity in ikosmos point. There are many trotskyists and post-trotskyists who think that the conditions that Trotsky described in 'The Revolution Betrayed' in 1937 essentially remained constant until Gorbachev introduced Glasnost, and the James Petras piece clearly shows that this is not the case.

I'm not going to delve into an analysis of post-war Soviet society in this post, but suffice to say my analysis would be far more nuanced than those of either James Petras or the 'anti-stalinist' intellectuals to he so disparages.

Tue, 2016-01-19 15:19

ikosmos

Ken Burch wrote:
There was never any justification for closed borders.

I call bullshit. To give just one example - the origin of the Berlin Wall, which evolved into a cruel barrier to the movement of people, and became a symbol of all that was wrong with the east bloc, was started as a way to address the hoarding of basic food staples at a time when people all over Germany, and Europe generally, were practically starving. The Soviets were providing basic food stuffs for the local population when CIA funded speculators, and just plain shit bags looking to profit, would make their way into the Soviet part of Germany, buy up all the cheap food, and make their way back to the "free" West. Fuck that shit.

Much of Ken's contribution is the usual litany which provides rich evidence, once again as if it were needed, that some of the left seem incapable of analyzing complicated phenomenon in social life and want, it seems, cartoonish black and white "solutions" to these matters, i.e., the "good guys" and the "bad guys". It's amusing how such mechanistic views are attributed to those with more balanced positions.

Tue, 2016-01-19 15:39

6079_Smith_W

Right. If those dirty fascists want food let them get an airplane and fly it in.I remember.

Though Stalinism ended long before 1989.

I don't see it as a defense of the east bloc, but there was an opportunity after the wall fell for the DDR to simply stay as its own country, and not sell into the re-unification fait accompli. In many ways it would have been a better course.

Unfortunately that was sealed when the people were given the offer to trade their ostmarks at par with the deutschmark, and they voted for reunification.

Tue, 2016-01-19 20:23

kropotkin1951

It started before Stalin or WWII. The Kronstadt Uprising was the iron fist of Lenin and Trotsky.

Totalitarianism is a mindset. Lets face it the Bolsheviks by definition were never the majority of the revolution and held power by ruthlessly killing any oppositon to theri absolute rule.

Tue, 2016-01-19 20:26

kropotkin1951

I loved this movie about East Germany after the reunification.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357/

Tue, 2016-01-19 20:38

#10

quizzical

maybe it's my age or something but i really find all this posturing over Russia the wonderful and Russia the bad weird.

and the whole talk of communism even weirder.

Tue, 2016-01-19 21:50

#11

Mr. Magoo

Quote:
the origin of the Berlin Wall, which evolved into a cruel barrier to the movement of people, and became a symbol of all that was wrong with the east bloc, was started as a way to address the hoarding of basic food staples at a time when people all over Germany, and Europe generally, were practically starving.

How long did that time -- a time when people all over Germany, and Europe generally, were practically starving -- last?

Also, were the people shot for trying to cross the wall ACTUALLY being shot for hoarding sugar?

Tue, 2016-01-19 22:35

#12

6079_Smith_W

Actually, once the attempt to blockade Berlin failed, the border was relatively open until 1952, long after the period when people were starving to death. When they did close it, the excuse they used was the same they used in 1961 for their "anti-fascist protection wall" - keeping out spies and terrorists - but really it was to stop the tide of people trying to get out, and the flow of smuggled goods in.

I liked "Goodbye Lenin". I like "The Lives of Others" a lot more. "I am my own Woman" is another very interesting film and book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_My_Own_Woman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others

Tue, 2016-01-19 22:44

#13

Mr. Magoo

Quote:
but really it was to stop the tide of people trying to get out, and the flow of smuggled goods in.

That makes double-plus good sense when you think about it.

If someone is a traitor to the revolution, you surely wouldn't want them to leave and never come back.

And if goods are short, who would want to wake up to -- suddenly -- jam for sale in stores, or whatever?

Tue, 2016-01-19 23:20

#14

Ken Burch

(dupe-post. self-delete).

Wed, 2016-01-20 01:15

#15

Ken Burch

ikosmos wrote:

Ken Burch wrote:
There was never any justification for closed borders.

I call bullshit. To give just one example - the origin of the Berlin Wall, which evolved into a cruel barrier to the movement of people, and became a symbol of all that was wrong with the east bloc, was started as a way to address the hoarding of basic food staples at a time when people all over Germany, and Europe generally, were practically starving. The Soviets were providing basic food stuffs for the local population when CIA funded speculators, and just plain shit bags looking to profit, would make their way into the Soviet part of Germany, buy up all the cheap food, and make their way back to the "free" West. Fuck that shit.

Much of Ken's contribution is the usual litany which provides rich evidence, once again as if it were needed, that some of the left seem incapable of analyzing complicated phenomenon in social life and want, it seems, cartoonish black and white "solutions" to these matters, i.e., the "good guys" and the "bad guys". It's amusing how such mechanistic views are attributed to those with more balanced positions.

The anti-Stalinist left(I'm talking about the actual left, not right-wing "social democrats" like Helmut Schmidt, Francois Mitterrand and before them Clement Attlee and Leon Blum) never saw it in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys".

We joined in denouncing everything the Western powers did to the USSR and the Pact states. We were anti-nuclear, anti-Contra, anti-apartheid, and anti-austerity. And most of us, as opposed to the tiny remnant of Stalinist apologists that existed in the Seventies and Eighties, remain on the socialist left today. We supported people like Tony Benn and Jesse Jackson then, and people like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders today.

It's just that we felt(and nothing has proved this view wrong, from what I can see)that the Pact states and the USSR between Lenin and Gorbachev had nothing whatsoever to do with what socialism and small-c communism were ever supposed to be about. .In fact, a lot of us thought that the regimes that still practiced "actually existing socialism" were, if anything, providing aid and comfort to Western capitalism(even if they had at one time played an indirect role in forcing Western capitalism to accept a severely watered-down form of social democracy) by allowing the West to use their indefensibly repressive practices as a way to smear the Western left, to imply that the Western left secretely wanted to replicate Stalinist oppression in "the West".

Let me ask this with sincere respect, in a genuine attempt to engage in the issues the link you posted discusses.

What would you have had the Western left do? DEFEND the repression in the Pact states and the USSR? Defend the closed borders? Defend the squandering of resources that should have been used for nothing but the construction of socialism on the construction of totally unneeded nuclear weapons and a massive war machine? Call for the preservation of the decayed Pact regimes in the fall of '89? How would doing any of that have prevented the triumph of neoliberalism or protected working people and the poor?

How would defending the Pact states ever have led to the liberation of the human race from oppression, exploitation and want? Nobody was ever going to be freed from their shackles by the Stasi.

As to your point about food speculators...obvipusly any government, anywhere has the right to take measures to prevent its population from food shortages. I can see taking measures to keep people out. But why was it ever necessary to prevent citizens of the DDR themselves from coming in and out of the country as they wished(of preventing anyone in any other country from doing the same, regardless of the supposed ideology of the regime)? Wouldn't it have been enough simply to search people and their vehicles for stolen foodstuffs at the border crossing? Once those shortages were over(as they clearly were within a few years after 1961)why leave the Wall up at all? Why continue to restrict the right to travel at all after the food shortages were over? Were Erich Honecker's "shoot-to-kill" orders to the DDR border guards ever justified? What does killing people just for wanting to travel have to do with socialism at all?

Was this ever worth creating the visual of the DDR(and the other Pact states)being places in which the population was confined inside the borders by force?

Wed, 2016-01-20 01:19

#16

mark_alfred

kropotkin1951 wrote:

I loved this movie about East Germany after the reunification.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357/

Agreed. I really enjoyed this film.

Wed, 2016-01-20 02:27

#17

Ken Burch

mark_alfred wrote:

kropotkin1951 wrote:

I loved this movie about East Germany after the reunification.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357/

Agreed. I really enjoyed this film.

The speech that Sigmund Jahn, the DDR cosmonaut that the guys have talked into appearing as the Party leader in a fictional address to the masses is, to my mind, one of the greatest socialist moments in cinematic history.

Here's the key part of it:

Socialism doesn't mean walling yourself in. It means reaching out to others, and living with others. Not just to dream about a better world, but to make a better world.

Wed, 2016-01-20 14:12

#18

ikosmos

Pathetic. Make some categorical statement and then retreat from your excessive claims by replying to a question that wasn't asked. Who gave permission to the incipient German fascists to murder Rosa Luxemburg?

Oh yeah. The stinking Social Democrats. Let's play that game. Because anything is better than identifying capitalism as the problem. Anything.

Wed, 2016-01-20 14:27

#19

6079_Smith_W

ikosmos wrote:

Who gave permission to the incipient German fascists to murder Rosa Luxemburg?

Oh yeah. The stinking Social Democrats. Let's play that game. Because anything is better than identifying capitalism as the problem. Anything.

I thought your argument was about NOT tarring an entire political philosophy with a single act by one government.

Though what do we take from that history if not that being communist is no guarantee you aren't going to change your stripes once you gain power.

Wed, 2016-01-20 14:52

#20

Ken Burch

I absolute identify capitalism as the problem.

Doing so doesn't mean a person has to defend the Soviet model or the decrepit and ultimately reactionary Pact states, none of whom could ever have played a meaningful role in building a world free of exploitation and want.

It didn't matter which geopolitical "side" came out ahead in the Cold War. The workers of the world would have been treated just as badly by global "realsozialismus" as they are by global neoliberalism.

BTW, I have never defended the SPD for its alliance with the Freikorps. Or for any of its other bad choices(like supporting the 1914-1918 war or undermining the revolution that overthrew the kaiser in 1918, OR its current politically suicidal choice to sit as a powerless and irrelevant junior partner in a grand coalition with Angela Merkel while rejecting any possible alliance with Die Linke).

I am not a right-wing social democrat. I'm a radical left-wing democratic socialist like Eugene Debs, Tony Benn, Fannie Lou Hamer, Kshama Sawant(whose successful re-election campaign I just participated in) or Jeremy Corbyn. My political and ideological heroes include Red Rosa, Emma Goldman, the Krondstadt rebels of 1921, the POUM and the CNT/FAI in Spain, the Freedom Riders, The French students and workers of 1968(whose revolution was stopped by the PCF, because it preferred to save capitalism rather than allow a revolution it did not get to lead to prevail) the Greenham Peace Camp women, the young heroes of Soweto and the British miners of 1984-85. Where do you get off acting like I'm a counterrevolutionary?

Do you really believe that the only options for people on the left side of the political sprectrum are right-wing social democracy or hardline Leninism?

Btw, I was trying to engage with you on a respectful level in my response to your point on the borders. Why the hostility from you in return?

Wed, 2016-01-20 15:00

#21

Ken Burch

And it's not about tarring an ideology. It's about denouncing the perversion of a great, liberating, transformational ideology(Marxism) into the rigid, repressive, and reactionary sham known as Marxism-Leninism.

If Marxism is to play the great and transcendent role it should play in the future, those who call themselves Marxists need to make clear that the lessons of the Stalinist and Brezhnevite eras have been learned and the lethal mistakes of that time will never be repeated.

What is so terrible about saying that things went badly wrong between 1924 and 1986?

Wed, 2016-01-20 15:11

#22

6079_Smith_W

It shouldn't be about tarring an ideology, but that is exactly the game ikosmos is playing here (albeit selectively), despite the fact we're supposed to peer over the top of a mountain of skulls to see the good that came out of the soviet union (and I actually thing there were a number of good things).

Wed, 2016-01-20 23:54

#23

Ken Burch

There were indeed some good things. But we face the same question that those who defend the heritage of both Zionism and the American Revolution face:

At what point does the good cease to outweigh the bad?

Sun, 2016-01-24 13:07

#24

ikosmos

Petras' brilliant piece, which points out some rather obvious facts, sticks in the craw of those intensely obstinate ideologues who cannot accept that anything good came out of the former Soviet Union. Ever.

When does the Cold War end for such people? When all Russians are dead. Literally.

Sun, 2016-01-24 18:54

#25

lagatta

That is utter nonsense. Petras is a most vulgar Marxist (I am a proud Marxist, by the way) and a great many Russians nowadays are anything but Marxist or Socialist of any persuasion.

And who but a hardcore Nazi who thinks the "Slavic Race" is inferior wishes any Russians dead, let alone all? This has utterly no relation to where I live, where Russians have integrated seamlessly into society, with their love of hockey and good times, and their tolerance for shovelling snow.

Mon, 2016-01-25 07:15

#26

Ken Burch

The weird thing is, most of us have acknowledged that the existence of the countries in the Soviet orbit did play a role in forcing the West to treat workers and the poor somewhat better than the otherwise would have.

It's just that we rejected the idea that that fact meant we should be apologists for the sometimes horrific other things those states did.

Is that such a horrible position to take?

There is no way anybody on any part of the left could have defended Brezhnev's decision to crush the Prague Spring by force, for example. Or what Krushchev did to Hungary. Both of those acts were the Soviet Union declaring war against the left-something that simply never should have happened(just as there was no excuse for the PCF to sabotage the libertarian socialist revolution in France in '68 when it was just about to win).

And prejudice against Slavs isn't what anyone on the anti-Stalinist left was ever about.

Tue, 2016-01-26 12:48

#27

josh

"The Western trade unions and the 'anti-Stalinist' Left (Social Democrats , Trotskyists and every sect and intellectual current in between), did yeoman service in not only ending the collectivist system "

How come he didn't include the kitchen sink? With the broad brush soaking inside?

Thu, 2016-01-28 08:36

#28

lagatta

What is the above a quote from? It sounds as if it was written decades ago.

Thu, 2016-01-28 15:38

#29

ygtbk

lagatta wrote:

What is the above a quote from? It sounds as if it was written decades ago.

It's from the piece that ikosmos linked in the opening post, written in 2012.

If you want a quality quote from the same piece, here's one:

Quote:

The entire Soviet bloc welfare program had been built from the top-down and, as a result, did not have a class-conscious, politicized, independent and militant class organization to defend it from the full-scale assault launched by the gangster-kleptocratic-clerical-neo-liberal-‘anti-Stalinist’ bloc.

Thu, 2016-01-28 17:36

#30

6079_Smith_W

Sounds like a job for the church police.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO0ZjJm-FPk

Thu, 2016-01-28 18:58

#31

lagatta

I just glanced at that piece of post-Stalinist cant. Indeed it is funny how revelatory the sentence on "top-down" (aka authoritarian) welfare was. Indeed that is why it could crumble so fast.

What is very strange in Petras' piece is the very vast array of "non-Stalinists", from the revolutionary left to State Department Liberals, he regroups, when such people could never have been in the same room without a fight.

And yes, I think most of us would agree that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc helped the western bourgeoisies in their demolition of the welfare state.

Wed, 2016-02-03 21:54

#32

Ken Burch

The weird thing about Petras attacking the revolutionary left is that he started as a Trotskyist...he was a member of something known as the Pathfinder Tendency

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinder_tendency

The Pathfinder tendency was one of the many factions that emerged out of the decline of the Fourth International in the Seventies and early Eighties(its founders were once part of the Socialist Workers Party). It's primary distinguishing characteristic was uncritical support for the Cuban Revolution and the policies of the government it produced. Pathfinder members denounced most, if not all calls for the end of repression and censorship in Leninist states as a threat to the survival of the Cuban revolutionary project. In otherwords, they followed the path of the Workers World Party(also a splinter from the SWP) and become more Stalinist than the Stalinists. I think we had a least one Babbler in the past who was essentially a Pathfinder type.

It is likely that involvement in Pathfinder informs Petras' hostility to those parts of the left who call for a recognition that the use of dictatorial tactics in the "actually existing socialist" states was a betrayal of socialism and that the repression ended up playing a critical role in bringing down those states in 1989.

Tue, 2016-02-09 13:17

#33

ikosmos

lagatta wrote:
... I think most of us would agree that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc helped the western bourgeoisies in their demolition of the welfare state.

Which, in a clumsy way, is the main point that Petras makes. Nice of you to sneak that in.

Wed, 2016-02-10 11:13

#34

iyraste1313

The total destruction of the welfare state in the western world, now is being facilitated by the total collapse of the corporate-government finance system, in their desperate attempt to bail themselves out!

No doubt, people will be forced to organize to their defence...but to what direction will their demands be oriented?

Where will arise some political opposition movements to challenge this bailout and bail in financial process?

No doubt some of the creative measures being taken outside the powers of the capitalist centres in this fast arising multipolar world will again play an important role....

Analyses of these creative measures and examinations of the potential opposition movements is a vital discussion now...as we watch in awed horror? the corporate meltdown!

Wed, 2016-02-10 11:21

#35

lagatta

I didn't "sneak that in". I've never thought otherwise. There are people who aren't apologists for either Western Imperialisms or Stalinism, you know.