Excerpt from article in the new issue:
....Since 1990 the Socialist Workers Party has explained the global reverberations of the fact that U.S. imperialism lost the Cold War.
As a byproduct of the implosion of the Soviet Union and other Stalinist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe by the opening of the 1990s, there was a rapid disintegration of the counterrevolutionary obstacle of governments and parties that falsely called themselves Communist and for decades had politically misled and undercut working-class and popular struggles around the globe. As a result, while the working class worldwide today has no mass independent class leadership, it faces coming class battles unbroken and free of Stalinist disorientation, something that wasn’t true for decades. Washington hadn’t “won” the Cold War.
The U.S. rulers acted on an opposite assumption. They were convinced they had triumphed and had a free hand worldwide. They intervened in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere — with disastrous results for toilers in those regions and seemingly endless military involvement for Washington....
i've gotta say this is one bit of analysis i've never quite understood. the 'cold war' was a conflict, both covert and overt, between the capitalist West and its proxies and the Stalinist East and its proxies. the West *did* win. resoundingly.
ReplyDeletethat doesn't mean that the fall of the Soviet Empire wasn't a net plus for working people worldwide, or that the U.S. and its allies have massively overextended themselves in the decades since -- but to continue to suggest the U.S. 'lost' the Cold War -- i just don't get it.
maybe i should try to get to oberlin this summer and ask? :-)
The cold war had a couple of components in my opinion.
DeleteA. Stalinist bureaucracies try to but time and peace by sacrificing revolution for agreements and alliances with U.S. imperialism.
B. U.S. benefiting from this situation in trying to push back revolutionary and anti colonial struggles.
But the Stalinist glue that held Popular Front together is happily gone.
Unfortunately this has also been continuation of the 90 crisis of communist party building and leadership.
IMHO
I reread this 2 weeks ago and appreciated it more:
DeleteTwo conflicting class views: Did U.S. win the Cold War? Have computers made capitalism stable? Are workers doing OK?
http://www.themilitant.com/2000/6420/642058.html