Watching Bitter Lake on shrooms rn

American Labor History 1619-1980

just copped The Long Twentieth Century

I didnt cry when Bookchin died
But Imma cry when Parenti does

RIP David Graeber and Mark Fisher

Anarcho-natoists be like

Imperialist military alliance between states that only invades other countries = needed for self-defence

State to defend yourself from said imperialist invaders = unnecessary, abolish it immediately

At the end of the day they are just regular liberal kaks

A genuine social democracy can only exist if the bourgeoisie are scared s***less of a communist revolution and are forced to compromise with the proletariat

Hence European social democracy's decline since the dissolution of the USSR

The European social democracies have been implementing Neoliberal reforms since the 70s way before soviet collapse. Their labor movement and social-imperialists are anything but revolutionary, but they're very organized so they got a great compromise during the golden age of Capitalism. And that strong labor movement has allowed them to better resist Austerity.

They welfare Capitalism bad and they got it

Strong neoliberal reforms proper have only started in the 1980s, where the Soviet decline was apparent and communist movements shrank

1970s neoliberalism was more limited worldwide, like Pinochet

The mass privatizations in most European countries began in the 1990s btw, in the UK and US neoliberalism was already underway in the 1980s under Thatcher and Reagan

1970s social democrats still sang The Internationale and s***

Correlation =/= Causation. I guarantee you that getting BTFO'd by Japanese industry was much more of a factor in Sweden than whatever was going on in the USSR which was never going to invade after WW2

Then you need to read up on more history my fella

Which country are you from

I recommend A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

Don't worry about it

The USSR was still the world's second biggest economy in the 80s

You really have to comprehend how much its sudden collapse influenced the political landscape even in capitalist countries

Almost all the communist movements committed harakiri instantly

In the Netherlands had a president that visited Chile under Allende and condemned the coup that installed Pinochet

That same party (PVDA) just another neoliberal party these days

Guys like Tony Benn were in high government posts in 1970s UK

It is absolutely remarkable how much the political landscape changed since then

Like the proliferation of French communist intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s is unimaginable today:

cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86S00588R000300380001-5.pdf

The CIA states that this shift only really appeared in the 80s

It wasn't about an invasion tho, it's about the internal threat of revolution and labor militancy. Nordic countries especially have a history with strong labor unions

In many western european countries you see the same pattern. Communist parties mergung or outright changing their entire platform after the collapse of the USSR, with Maoist parties this happened a lot after Deng came to power

Of course but the Capitalist welfare state was on its way out before that. What the collapse of the USSR did was give carte blanche to US foreign policy and discredit socialist politics which made Austerity easier to implement but they were already implementing it.

Yeah but the nordic labor unions and socialists are especially reformist / eurocommunist. I could see the argument made for the French left but it was really never the case in Scandinavia.

The examples I know were primarily in the 1990s. For example in Germany the Agenda 21 under Schröder, which dismantled one of the strongest welfare states in the world. I think if we did a study we would find most privatizations in the EU happened in the 90s. I don't have any statistics right now to prove it tho

The threat is implicit by having a huge superpower to the east that can destabilize your country via intellectuals and riling up the population, it doesn't have to make 100% sense, it just has to threaten the bourgeoisie enough to back down a bit

I really think you are seriously underestimating what the mere existence of the USSR + Warsaw Pact meant for Western Europe

But even a reformist socialist movement is enough of a threat for capitalists to make concessions especially when it's connected to labor unions and even more so when revolutionary communist parties are bigger as well