Re: Cold war ('Imperialism has never had it so good')

[Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Not one of our great threads this, I fear  though it is fairly lively.  I
inadvertently started it when I posted my paper  on Marxist politics.  I
wrote that "American won the Cold War, we were defeated".  I  must say that
I thought that was a fairly uncontroversial remark.

However it seems I  raised the spectre of pessimism and support for stalinism.

Well to take pessimism first.  I think the pessimism is v optimism debate is
a fairly pointless one. Here I well recall being part of an audience that
howled down  the Australian Marxist  Rachel Sharp because she said the
revolution was not imminent.  This was in 1978 approx  and I have  to say
that I bellowed and hissed as loud as anyone.

Now to repeat, I think that the Socialism/communist movement has had a
spectacle defeat since 1989.  That is not to say that I endorse or endorsed
the Berlin Wall etc  But with the collapse of a centrally planned economy we
lost one of our best rejoinders to TINA (There is no alternative), the
argument that apologists for capitalism inevitably fall back on.

Now of course the dialectic never dies.  Total victory for the Americans has
brought a price.  As I have said before, it has removed the cement  that
bound conservatives and right wing radicals together.  Engels interestingly
enough remarked somewhere that it was sometims better to lose  a war than
win one and I suspect that this is proving to be the case with the Americans.

Certainly the re-growth of populism a  la Pat Buchanan shows that the
communist bogey is being sorely missed as a social unifier and focus..

And of course resistance continues.


But if we think of the Gramscian concept of hegemony then there is no doubt
IMHO that we have never been further from contesting hegemony successfully
than we are at present.  And if you doubt my words, think of the phenomenon
of market socialism.

Now for the stalinist question.  Why should we care about American victory
over the Soviet Union?  After all they were only defeating the Stalinists.

This  issue, BTW, surfaced in a rather sharp exchange between Adam and Louis
P. over the PDS (?). Adam took a hard anti-Stalinist ISO line.  Well in the
years since I have been part of that tendency I have moved towards what I
feel is a more subtle analysis of a complex phenomenon  - the Communist
Parties of what was the "socialist" world.  so I did not  leap up and down
in joy when they were defeated.  I  would also argue that the experience of
the people of the former Soviet Union supports  my  new found caution.

regards

Gary



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