FWD to 57:30
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swhN_Sdvo7o[/youtube]
[i]We should recognize what I think is true, I’ve written about it plenty myself, that the Bolshevik Revolution, was really a coup, was really a counter-revolution, which placed state power in the hands of a highly authoritarian anti-socialist group which within a couple of months had destroyed the factory councils, had destroyed the Soviets, had dismissed the Constituent Assembly (because they knew they were gonna lose) and have eliminated every popular movement; and had done exactly what Trotsky said: turned the country into a labor army under the control of the maximal leader. That was mid 1918. And since then there hasn’t been a shred of socialism in the Soviet Union!
Now of course they called it “socialism”, but they also called it “democracy”, you know, they were “people’s democracies”, “the purest form of democracy”, they were “socialism”. The West, the big propaganda system in the world, of course, just laughed at the “democracy” part, but it loved the “socialism” part because that’s a way to defame socialism. So if you think that the fall of the Soviet Union is a blow to socialism, you ought to also think, on the same grounds, that it’s a blow to democracy. After all, they call themselves democracies too, so why isn’t it a blow to democracy? Makes as much sense. It’s only when it gets filtered through the Western propaganda system that it’s not a blow to democracy, but it is a blow to socialism.
But, you know, there’s actually no reason to play that game. Whether you play it in Dissent [the magazine] or in the Nation [the magazine] or on the Right or anywhere else, expose it for the fraud that it is.
[Someone asks question]
What ideology? The ideology of totalitarianism? Yeah it’s deeply flawed. I mean, they were the initial modern totalitarians.
[Asks another question]
It doesn’t have anything to do with socialism. They destroyed socialism within weeks! You know. They didn’t wait. By 1918 it was finished. And they knew it. You know. Like, it’s not a secret; they knew it. I mean, in fact, Lenin as soon as, you know, as soon as he sort of got grips of things, he moved to what he called “state capitalism”. Which is what it was. It had nothing to do with socialism.
Socialism… I mean we can argue about… there’s no point arguing about what the word means, but what it always meant at the core was that producers take control of production, working people take control of production: what’s sometimes called industrial democracy, that was the absolute core of it. Well, you know, there was more socialism in Germany, in Western Europe, than there was in Russia.
No, Russia’s about the most anti-socialist place you can imagine, since 1918. It had wage-labor, had super-exploitation, had no element of worker’s control or involvement or participation. What’s that got to do with socialism? It’s the exact opposite on every point.
As I say, the West liked to call that “socialism” while laughing at the fact that they called themselves “Democrats”, but that’s for purely propaganda reasons. I mean, unless you’re committed to being part of the Western propaganda system, there’s nothing to say about that issue, except to laugh.[/i]