MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 24th December, 2022) The Left in Europe and the United States has undergone major changes over 100 years after the founding of the Soviet Union, moving away from the early 20th-century class-based politics and turning into the movement of professional managerial classes, while simultaneously preserving its guiding principle of "oppressed vs oppressor," experts told Sputnik.
On December 30, 1922, five years after the October Revolution, the First All-Union Congress of Soviets in Moscow declared the creation one of the world's first socialist state, an entity ostensibly build on Marxist precepts and dedicated to ushering a new era of Communism onto the world.
For almost 70 years, that state remained one of the key players in global affairs, captivating the thoughts of politicians, scholars, artists, journalists and many others, regardless of whether they cheered or condemned it. Its creators thought of it as a beachhead for a world revolution that was supposed to engulf the entire globe and even though those plans failed to become reality, the Soviet Union served as an organizational and symbolic center for the leftist movements in many countries that were inspired by what they considered a true alternative to the prevailing capitalist economic order.
"Soviet socialism was a blotted creature, providing ammunition to the permanent and inevitable anti-socialist campaigns, but its very existence indicated that an end to capitalism was more likely than the end of the world," Goran Therborn, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Cambridge, said, crediting the Soviet Union for is crucial part in "making a socialist horizon the prevailing part" of the leftist world culture in the 20th century and inspiring socialist movements in countries outside of Europe and North America.
In a similar vein, the Soviet Union had a major geopolitical effect on the world, playing major parts in the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the subsequent conflicts in Cuba and Vietnam, as well as helping to promote progressive social movements around the globe.
"The USSR has from its very beginning been a major source of inspiration and support for anti-colonial and anti-racist movements of the world. The very existence of the Soviet Union as an anti-racist superpower got US President (Dwight) Eisenhower, personally uninterested in racial equality, to send Federal troops to protect Black children from lynch mobs when going to just opened desegregated schools," Therborn explained.
Despite the enormous influences, wielded by the Soviet Union, Therborn highlighted aspects of the Soviet politics that were the sources of disappointment among the Left at different points in time, such as Bolshevik sectarianism built into the Soviet system, the Stalinist terror of the 1930s, the "features of imperial continuity" in foreign policy, military interventions in Eastern Europe, de-Stalinization, a rift with China and the attempt at peaceful coexistence with capitalist powers.
These breaks of disappointment, in turn, fueled the search for alternative intellectual approaches that deviated considerably from the official Soviet doctrine, especially in the post-WWII years. These include but are not limited to, Maoism, Critical Theory, different versions of postmodernism, and their descendants.
Michael Rectenwald, author and former professor of Liberal Studies and Global Studies at New York University, stressed the importance Sino-Soviet split and the subsequent shift in the West away from the traditional Marxist view of socialism emerging from advanced industrial capitalism toward a Maoist interpretation of Marxism that stressed class consciousness of the masses.
"This shift, I believe, partly explains the New Left's adoption of identity politics; it was no longer 'the working class' that was the effective agent of revolutionary potential but rather the marginalized identity groups who had the right 'consciousness' � those on the periphery of capitalism, both socially and geographically. This also partly explains the Left's dual obsessions with 'correct' thinking and identity," Rectenwald continued.
He highlighted the importance of the revelations about the Soviet Union following de-Stalinization, which created a general feeling of disaffection among Western Marxists and pushed many toward embracing the idea of "cultural revolution," adopting ideas from Maoism as well as Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt school of Critical Theory, who escaped to the US from Germany in 1933.
"From the latter, it was Herbert Marcuse's notion of a Left cobbled together from various movements � feminism, environmentalism, New Age philosophy, and others � that represented revolutionary potential. The working class had been 'co-opted' by the capitalist system (thanks mostly to increasing wealth) and was no longer useful for the New Left," Rectenwald stated.
These intellectual developments got intertwined with the managerial revolution in the mid-century, as well as increased specialization, division of labor, the expansion of the public sector, and the technological changes ushered by the digital revolution, according to anarchist theoretician and analyst Keith Preston.
"These technical and economic changes have merged with the cultural movements that first became influential in the post-World War Two era and have continued to expand since, such as broader social integration involving gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, mass immigration, the ecology movement, and other such currents," Preston said.
This, of course, did not mean that traditional Soviet-affiliated communist parties disappeared: they were very much active after WWII, including in Western European countries such as Italy and France, even though their membership was dwindling in the final decades of the 20th century. Ironically, post-war European communists show a remarkable degree of socially conservative attitudes when viewed through the lenses of more recent leftist thought.
"Western communist parties worked to avoid moral scandal and the historian of the PCF (French Communist Party) Annie Kriegel compared the cultural climate of French Communism after the Second World War to that of the Catholic Right," Paul Gottfried, the editor-in-chief of "Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture" and Raffensperger professor of humanities emeritus at Elizabethtown College, said.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 furthered the shift to culture-based politics as the defunct giant's command-style economy was viewed as inviable and Moscow could no longer influence European communist parties to maintain their internal discipline.
"The emergence and stunning successes of the woke Left presupposed the disappearance of the traditional Communist Left, particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union. The weirdos on the left, whom the Soviet-led Communists tried to keep in the shadows rose to dominance among progressives. The Left ceased to be primarily about defending or excusing Soviet policies and came to center on moral and cultural revolution," Gottfried stated.
Preston, for his part, cited economist Thomas Piketty's idea of the "Brahmin Left" which is mostly made up of "upwardly mobile middle-class and upper-middle-class professionals, managers, and capitalists within new economic sectors rooted in the digital revolution," as the anarchist scholar put it.
"The Western Left has almost completely abandoned a materialist approach to politics, emphasizing class struggle or antagonism. That would have been unthinkable a century ago. What is regarded as 'the Left' in the West today is a cultural movement whose class base is the upper middle class," Preston said, dismissing the modern Left as "a form of capitalism that has been fused with cultural bohemianism that would have been considered a form of aristocratic decadence or bourgeois degeneracy by leftists of 100 years ago."
Nevertheless, the modern Left still retains what Rectenwald calls "underdog-ism," i.e. the idea of championing the interests of allegedly oppressed groups against designated oppressors. Rectenwald stressed that this aspect, vital to leftist ethos, runs through leftist discourse from orthodox Marxism to postmodernism, no matter the period.
"If contemporary leftists met Bolsheviks, without first being told who they were, most would likely think that the latter were 'fascists.' Conversely, the Bolsheviks would think that the contemporary Left consists of misdirected lunatics. However, given time, each would recognize themselves in the other," Rectenwald concluded.
