World Revolution, USSR and entrenchment

[Guardia Rossa]

From what I understood:

The USSR failed because it could not lead to a worldwide revolution, and like Revolutionary France, resorted to geopoliticism and wars to spread it's ideals.

A proletarian revolution needs to be global, otherwise it cannot build communism, as the bourgeoisie is still powerfull enough to destroy the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Is this it? If a revolution fails and stays restricted to an area (Let's say, the American Continent) is it's fall inevitable? (If there are no more revolutions and the American Continent cannot invade Eurafrasia)

Sorry for my ignorance.

[Armchair Partisan]

Another thing that played a large part in the failure of the Soviet revolution was the relatively small ratio of the proletariat vs. the peasantry, whose interests could not entirely be aligned with those of the workers, no matter how hard the Bolsheviks tried. For that matter, this is also why a second workers' revolution was unable to dislodge the Bolsheviks when they turned on the workers' soviets themselves.

[tuwix]

From what I understood:

The USSR failed because it could not lead to a worldwide revolution, and like Revolutionary France, resorted to geopoliticism and wars to spread it's ideals.

A proletarian revolution needs to be global, otherwise it cannot build communism, as the bourgeoisie is still powerfull enough to destroy the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Is this it? If a revolution fails and stays restricted to an area (Let's say, the American Continent) is it's fall inevitable? (If there are no more revolutions and the American Continent cannot invade Eurafrasia)


Besides there was no DotP in the Soviet Union. The new bureaucratic elite has taken control over means of production instead of working class. And there ware many other errors made by Lenin and his party...

[RedMaterialist]

From what I understood:

The USSR failed because it could not lead to a worldwide revolution, and like Revolutionary France, resorted to geopoliticism and wars to spread it's ideals.

A proletarian revolution needs to be global, otherwise it cannot build communism, as the bourgeoisie is still powerfull enough to destroy the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Is this it? If a revolution fails and stays restricted to an area (Let's say, the American Continent) is it's fall inevitable? (If there are no more revolutions and the American Continent cannot invade Eurafrasia)

Sorry for my ignorance.

The USSR failed because the Soviet state collapsed in 1989.

[Zwatt]

From what I understood:

The USSR failed because it could not lead to a worldwide revolution, and like Revolutionary France, resorted to geopoliticism and wars to spread it's ideals.

A proletarian revolution needs to be global, otherwise it cannot build communism, as the bourgeoisie is still powerfull enough to destroy the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Is this it? If a revolution fails and stays restricted to an area (Let's say, the American Continent) is it's fall inevitable? (If there are no more revolutions and the American Continent cannot invade Eurafrasia)

Sorry for my ignorance.
The USSR failed for several reasons, a large one being that they were not able to start a global revolution so they were ultimately isolated by capitalist nations. Also they progressively became swamped in bureaucracy and the concerns of the bourgeoisie.

[ñángara]

... there ware many other errors made by Lenin ...
I won't blame much on Lenin as he was never the same since Fanni Kaplan shot at him in 1918.


The USSR failed because the Soviet state collapsed in 1989.

Was it the cause or the effect of the failure?

[Hatshepsut]

I'm skeptical of single-cause explanations. 1989-1991 was only the visible denouement where it all imploded; the USSR was in trouble long before then, although bourgeois propaganda (such as Reader's Digest constantly pointing to its great war-making powers) blinded the public to that fact. By the mid-1970s I don't think the USSR was fully able to compete with the USA in economic or global military matters anymore.

The USSR had lots of internal problems as well, succumbing to bureaucratization and the creation of new classes. The early events mentioned above with the peasantry and the workers, along with antagonism between them, set the stage for future problems. The Ukraine famine (associated with forced industrialization) and the later purges irreparably damaged the Soviet state's ability to gain the trust of its peoples. National sentiments remained strong in Georgia, the Stans, the Far East, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics; the Russians tried to dilute this by moving people around like pawns but that didn't work too well.

It's easy to second-guess however. Without forced industrialization, perhaps Hitler would have taken it all, giving Ukrainians the "opportunity" to die at Nazi hands instead.

[ñángara]

I'm skeptical of single-cause explanations ...
There is one: the theory is incomplete. A "socialist" revolution in a backward country only produces a state capitalism.

[L.A.P.]

The view of the Bordiga/Italian Left is that the Russian Revolution, like the German Revolution of 1848, had a dual character of both an anti-feudal and anti-bourgeois revolution. The anti-feudal revolution was a total victory on all planes of the social field; however, the anti-bourgeois revolution was a military and political victory, but an economic and social defeat. Due to the socio-economic defeat of the proletarian-socialist revolution, the Bolshevik Party retreated to the bourgeois-democratic cause. Thus, the Bolshevik State became an agent for eliminating pre-capitalist forms in order to make way for primitive capital accumulation.

I would say that the economic and social defeat of the proletarian-socialist revolution was rooted in its isolation from the total defeats of not just the German Revolution, but also the Hungarian Revolution and the Italian factory-council movement. These defeats were not inevitable though, as the Russian Communist Left correctly identified the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty as a massive blow to the international revolution. Although Lenin formally split from Second International orthodoxy, he still held onto a lot of the ideological baggage of this orthodoxy. For example: the notion that state-nationalization and similar reforms are a necessary step towards "socialism" before the working class simply seizes political power over the already-socialized economy, which is why Lenin and Trotsky thought the capitulation to state capitalism was actually a "progressive" step in the right direction. Rosa Luxemburg also pointed out the fatal flaws of Bolshevik policies on national self-determination, land distribution to the peasantry, (mis)equating the dictatorship of the party with the dictatorship of the class, etc.

The objective conditions of the world revolution ultimately led to the degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolution, but the subjective factor played by Lenin and Trotsky's ruling faction further exacerbated this defeat.

[Armchair Partisan]

The USSR failed because the Soviet state collapsed in 1989.

No, it was precisely the reverse. By the way, the Soviet state collapsed in 1991, not in 1989. The fate of the Soviet Union was touch-and-go up to the August Coup of 1991, before which most of the republics, except for the Baltic states and Armenia, approved the continuation of the USSR (as the 'Union of Sovereign States') in a popular referendum.

On the other hand, I have honestly no idea what your vision of socialism is if you think that the USSR of the 1970s or the 1980s was not a failure of the ideals of socialism.

[RedMaterialist]

I won't blame much on Lenin as he was never the same since Fanni Kaplan shot at him in 1918.


Was it the cause or the effect of the failure?

the cause

[RedMaterialist]

No, it was precisely the reverse. By the way, the Soviet state collapsed in 1991, not in 1989. The fate of the Soviet Union was touch-and-go up to the August Coup of 1991, before which most of the republics, except for the Baltic states and Armenia, approved the continuation of the USSR (as the 'Union of Sovereign States') in a popular referendum.

On the other hand, I have honestly no idea what your vision of socialism is if you think that the USSR of the 1970s or the 1980s was not a failure of the ideals of socialism.

It was the failure of a specific development of socialism under specific economic, historical, social and material conditions. There is no such thing as "ideal" socialism. The fate of the Soviet Union was touch and go from 1917 to 1991-1989. It survived civil war, invasion by western imperialism, then defeated Hitler at a cost of 40 million lives. It assisted revolution in China, Vietnam, Cuba, South Africa, Angola. It became a world superpower.

Then it collapsed.

My vision of socialism is still, I think, that of Marx and Engels: establishment of a world proletarian dictatorship which will suppress capitalism out of existence. The Soviet Union established the dictatorship in one state. It worked for 75 yrs then collapsed.

[RedMaterialist]

I'm skeptical of single-cause explanations. 1989-1991 was only the visible denouement where it all imploded; the USSR was in trouble long before then, although bourgeois propaganda (such as Reader's Digest constantly pointing to its great war-making powers) blinded the public to that fact. By the mid-1970s I don't think the USSR was fully able to compete with the USA in economic or global military matters anymore.



The leading american economist, Paul Samuelson, said in 1989, "Contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the Soviet economy is proof that... a socialist command economy can function and even thrive."

Needless to say Samuelson was disappeared from western economic theory in 1991.

[Hatshepsut]

RE: Samuelson

The USSR'S economy functioned, though "thrive" is a relative matter. They weren't going to win the goodies game with West Germany and the capitalist bloc. Russia's standards of living were low. But one may compare them with what followed immediately afterward: A drop in men's life expectancy at birth from 72 years in the 1980s to just 59 in the decade after that; next Putin's aggressive foreign policy covering his creation of a land where a favored few are very rich and everyone else struggles for economic air.