On 22 Aug, 19:16, John Holmes  wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Aug 2008, Steve Wallis wrote:
> > I've heard that most people in the USA associate the word "socialism"
> > with the Stalinist states that collapsed in the USSR and Eastern
> > Europe. Very few leftists advocate that form of society any more. If
> > you ask people do they want freedom or socialism, most people would
> > say "freedom". I would say both.
>
> I think it is not only in the USA that people associate the word
> "socialism" with the old Stalinist states. This is only natural, as
> these are the only places where capitalism was ever abolished.
> "Socialism" in England etc. has always been a bad joke.

In the UK, Russia was generally called "communist" rather than
"socialist" in the media. People here have often associated the word
"socialist" with Labour, which I agree was "a bad joke", as with
social democratic parties elsewhere in Europe.

In Glasgow where I am currently living, they are more likely to
associate "socialist" with the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), which
is certainly a step forward (although people tend to be very
pessimistic of the chances of achieving it after the Tommy Sheridan
defamation trial and subsequent split in the SSP and loss of its six
Members of the Scottish Parliament).

In Britain generally, the term "socialist" quite often reminds people
of the Socialist Workers Party (the largest Trotskyist party), whose
sectarianism and opportunism puts many off...

Before the collapse of Stalinism in about 1990, the Communist Party of
Great Britain (CPGB) was a significant force, but it has split into
small largely irrelevant fragments. [The fragment currently using the
CPGB name has the best newspaper for debates on the left - the Weekly
Worker.]

> Explaining
> what went wrong in the Russian Revolution, so that next time around
> the same mistakes will not be repeated, is a prime task of radicals
> right now.

I agree (and argue for a government elected by proportional
representation preferably using single transferable vote, whether
socialist or capitalist). I've written about the mistakes of the
Russian Revolution in the overview of my autobiography (http://
revolutiondestroyed.net/overview.html), so to save me time and effort
I've included three paragraphs from it below:

The first successful socialist revolution in any country in the world
occurred in Russia in October 1917. There had been an earlier
revolution in that country in February the same year, which overthrew
Tsar Nicholas II (the king) and established a capitalist Provisional
Government. The Bolsheviks, who later renamed themselves the Communist
Party, called for a Constituent Assembly but the Provisional
Government refused demands for that or any other sort of democracy.
Meanwhile, workers, peasants and soldiers organised themselves in a
hierarchy of committees known as “soviets”. When he returned from
exile abroad, Vladimir Lenin called for “all power to the soviets”,
contradicting his party’s call for a Constituent Assembly. After the
October revolution, Lenin and his main ally Leon Trotsky persuaded the
Bolshevik Central Committee to abolish the Assembly by force when
their party and its allies (the left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries
mainly consisting of poor peasants) lost the elections to it, in
favour of rule by the soviets. Despite the fact that about 90% of the
population were peasants, the soviets had been fixed so that workers
had more power than the peasantry. Rule by the working class was
dubbed “the dictatorship of the proletariat” by Marxists, although
most people who regard themselves as Marxists nowadays (including
Trotskyists) avoid using that term and claim that this rule by a
minority of the population was “democratic”. Arguing that is similar
to claiming that apartheid South Africa was democratic, despite the
fact that only a minority (white people in the latter country) had the
vote.

Lenin and Trotsky argued (at the time and later justified by Trotsky
in his History of the Russian Revolution) that the Bolsheviks would
have suffered massive repression if they hadn’t abolished the
Assembly. In my view, however, that would have been impossible in a
country where two revolutions had occurred in a single year. In my
opinion, the Bolsheviks should have let the right-wing Socialist
Revolutionaries – mainly consisting of large landowners who, because
they were better organised in the countryside, won the Assembly
elections – take power and show themselves up in practice, after which
there would probably have been another revolution bringing socialists
to power, and then been able to get a democratic mandate. Even better,
the Bolsheviks should have gone into the countryside before the
Assembly elections and set up a united socialist party, mainly
composed of workers and poor peasants, and that party would probably
have won those elections.

As a result of the decision to abolish the Constituent Assembly,
socialists, particularly those who call themselves “communists” or
“Marxists” – or various hues of Marxism such as “Trotskyists”,
“Maoists” and “Marxist-Leninists” (the term Stalinists prefer to call
themselves due to the reputation of their idol, Joseph Stalin, as a
brutal dictator responsible for the massacre of millions of people) –
have been regarded as undemocratic ever since by many people around
the world. This has undoubtedly been a major factor in the failure of
subsequent attempted socialist revolutions (such as in Germany, Spain
and Portugal).

--
Steve Wallis (Glasgow, Scotland)
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Author, "Revolution Destroyed? Have I ensured that a world socialist
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