heres a cool idea: what if in 2017 tumblr commie kids gave up the creepy romanticization of the soviet union thing in favor of the aesthetics of american labor history–the haymarket riot, the pullman strike, the great railroad strike, emma goldman & yiddish socialism, woody guthrie, pete seeger, paul robeson, the iww and the 1912 textile workers’ strike, the ladies’ garment workers’ union, wpa murals, the american communist party, bread and roses, the union maid. that’s the Good Shit if yr looking for historical leftist culture imo
Seriously tho, kids.
The USSR was a blood-soaked mess. A racist, anti-semitic, sexist blood-soaked mess at that. Do not repeat the sins of the Left of the 60s/etc by ignoring that. (Same goes for Maoist China, etc.) To ignore that is to literally piss on a truly appalling number of graves As an allegory, Animal Farm’s inaccuracies were that it’s not grim and horrific enough. The most conservative and hesitant and “well we don’t want to be hysterical about this” count of Stalin’s death toll, not including famine-victims, is 4 million; the one which, after various amounts of research, I find most convincing is about 20 million. Mao’s Great Leap Forward killed anywhere from 18 to 50 million, and we have literal footage of Tienamen, guys.
This is not the good example you are looking for. Do not romanticise them.
100% go back, as OP says, to the things that actually had good results (like a 40 hour work-week and basic human worker’s rights and shite) and did not do them over mountains of corpses. We have lots! They even included (gosh!) women! and queers! and people of colour/different ethnicities! They do all the things you want.
These are your models. Not those bloody handed bastards over there.
honestly, now is more important than ever to remember the historical contributions that the working class has made for social movements, given how much the media have taken blaming them for the rise of fascism.
From Trump to Brexit, the narrative being spun has been that of “the working class were too poor and too dumb to know better” and how both Brexit and Trump spoke for them or to them, even though a majority of that demographic are non-white/immigrant/minorities who are severely affected by the political outcome. It’s a false narrative and it is both classist and racist and erases the fact that labour rights and worker’s rights and social rights in West Europe and Americas have come from and were heavily supported by the socialist left and working classes.
Just to start off, I was reading the other day about The 1936 Battle of Cable Street, which was a stand organised by the local working class comprising of Jewish locals, the Irish locals, Labour and Communist party members in a demonstration against a Nazi march that lead to confrontation with the police (Discworld fans, read the fuck up about this because you will find a lot of what Pratchett was referencing in Night Watch).
I’m sure there’s probably a lot more examples, and what OP mentioned definitely deserves more historical context and background. But the fact is that those historical contexts are either forgotten or ignored by the tumblr social justice commie kids scene because clueless privileged teenagers are more willing to worship dead genocidal dictators for cheap aesthetics than do actual fucking research.
There’s a difference between celebrating bloody totalitarian regimes and celebrating actual socialist and leftist movements that had a positive outcome, in all their complexities, struggles and conflicts. And that difference means research and looking at the contexts of historical and social political landscapes of the time, the sum of which unfortunately can’t be reduced to sickle-and-hammer on a pastel colour palette.
Ugh -_-’ There’s so much great history here in the U.S. without looking to something like the USSR. And a lot of it’s being forgotten. By everyone. If people on the left can’t even remember some of it then how is the rest of the country supposed to.
I swear, my Papaw and his generation stared down hell to get the unions into the mines during and after the coal wars. He was always proud of being in the UMWA and working in the CCC. He’d be rolling in his grave if he heard some of the family talk now and the rhetoric being pitched around.
People died in this country, just trying to get decent working conditions. We owe it to them to not ignore our own history.
I don’t think this is a result of privilege so much as education. Like, hardly ANY of this stuff is actually taught in the US, and when it is(like the Haymarket “Riots”) it’s taught without context and from an anti-labor slant that portrays them as ineffective and inexplicable(for instance, did you know about the severe Pinkerton violence against labor activists leading up to the march, or that the Haymarket “Riot” is where May Day comes from? These aren’t things widely taught in US schools). Hell, thanks to Republicans and ALEC, we have a handful of states across the US(including my own, Texas) where teachers can currently get in serious trouble for going in-depth about the social movements that the New Deal and Great Society reforms had their roots in; the best you’re likely to get is some nebulous talk about “Progressives”, and maybe a summary of the issues they were interested in(with a particular focus on Prohibition to paint them as moral prudes, because when has conservative propaganda ever had any damn consistency?). And the US media has, historically, cared far more about covering the music these movements produced, and particularly the personalities who inherited that musical tradition during the WWII and Post-War generations like Dylan and Guthrie, than the stuff they were actually protesting ABOUT, or the movements they were part of.
People can only work with the information they have, and they can only know to look up information about what they know exists, so if they’ve been taught that the only political force to successfully challenge the capitalist establishment is Bolshevik Communism(and they’re never taught outside of college that the Bolsheviks were a particular expression of Marxism which was a particular expression of Communism, that there were different types of Marxism, of Communism, and of Labor and Leftist activism), and they’re dissatisfied with the capitalist establishment, then they’re going to idolize what they know.
Though I will say this; Bolshevism(and Maoism, which is a particular sort of Bolshevism) and it’s “kill our way to Utopia” vision appeals to a frustrated feeling of powerlessness, hunger for grand millennarian resets, and a certain naive obsession with purity of morality, purpose, and action which appeals to younger activists. Most folks have their “burn it all down” phase, usually when they’re at a point in life where they have only limited control over their own, and while snarking about it is always gonna be a Thing for those of us not currently trying to manage that rage, because Snark is simply the 8est coping mech there is, I don’t think painting those still wrestling with it as our enemy, rather than as who we were in our teens, is terribly helpful.
