Status Updates From Blackshirts and Reds: Ratio...

wait it’s so good 🥲 explains so much about what’s happening in the us under trump even though it was written almost 30 years ago

The overthrow of communism gave the green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, and no longer restrained by a competing system, the corporate class rolled back gains that working people in the West won over the years.

The overthrow of Soviet communist gvmts was cheered by many leftists. Now democracy would have its day.

[Instead], the capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe weakened the numerous Third World liberation struggles that received aid from the Soviet Union and brought a whole new crop of right-wing governments into existence, ones that now worked hand in-glove with U.S. global counterrevolutionaries around the globe.

Decentralization vs. Survival
For a people's revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society's institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone's liking.

The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism —not created from one's imagination but developed through actual historical experience— could have taken hold and worked better.