Comments on: Saturday round-up: lazy blogger edition

By: cgeye

cgeye — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:03:13 +0000

And, Ellie, megadittoes — not having Communism as the far-wall of leftist activism is the equivalent of no longer having the Black Panthers for civil rights purposes. There’s no reason to negotiate with eminently reasonable people, since they’ll capitulate before allowing their followers to truly turn radical.

Negotiators only work when they’re the force holding back something catastrophically worse — and, viz. Obama’s administration, that’s why the left has diminished to a pale reflection of a frowny face, in American political discourse, outside the Occupy movement.

By: cgeye

cgeye — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:00:02 +0000

J.O.P.: Really? The cycle of lynching and Jim Crow would have been broken absent the Soviet threat? Nope — that’s why blacks allied themselves with Communists, because Communists were the only white political force that gave a damn about living African Americans.

That’s also why the HUAC purges were so virulent — who cared about a few homos and leftists in academe? It was the leftists on the street level, organizing blacks even when the unions wouldn’t let them join, that made the spectre of blacks mobilized against racist authorities a very real problem — a race war that blacks could have won, with returning soldiers’ guns and a populace no longer willing to bow down. Port Chicago, anyone?

By: Ellie

Ellie — Mon, 07 May 2012 22:51:18 +0000

Echidne’s post is intriguing and makes a lot of sense to me. Isn’t there a political science theory that radicalizing the margins shifts the center and the boundaries of acceptable political discourse (the Overton window, maybe?), so having world communism out there at the far left of the spectrum would tend to pull the ideological center left. More anecdotally, what I hear from my modern history students is some variation on “It’s obvious that communism doesn’t work and capitalism works way better, so Olde Timey Folks and/or Europeans are just silly to have ever believed in socialistic alternatives to liberal capitalism.” From this, I take that the end of the Cold War, the demise of Soviet communism, and the idea that U.S.-led Western capitalism “won” have been absorbed into American public discourse in such a way as to naturalize capitalism as the only feasible and (key) non-ideological economic order.

By: J. Otto Pohl

J. Otto Pohl — Mon, 07 May 2012 15:17:52 +0000

Western Dave:

Yes, I know that Eisenhower and Kennedy connected Civil Rights with being able to outbid Moscow for influence in the Third World. Although absent the Cold War I still think the more important domestic considerations would have still prevailed. But, most economic regulation in the US was put in place in the 1930s at a time considerably before Kennan’s long telegram and the Cold War. I do not think that these regulations were maintained in the US because of foreign policy considerations rather than domestic ones. The post in question claimed that the cause of deregulation in the US domestic economy in recent decades was the absence of the USSR. This would imply that these regulations only existed in the US because of the conflict with the USSR. I do not believe that these regulations were maintained in the US because of the existence of the USSR. But, rather their continued presence and later elimination are primarily the result of domestic factors.

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Mon, 07 May 2012 13:22:30 +0000

J Otto,
Check out the end of the long telegram in which Kennan explicitly says: “Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. World communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue. This is point at which domestic and foreign policies meets Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués. If we cannot abandon fatalism and indifference in face of deficiencies of our own society, Moscow will profit–Moscow cannot help profiting by them in its foreign policies.” “Solving internal problems,” in this case refers to two things economic inequality and unpredictability (a huge fear still in the post-War era) and the “race problem.” In particular, the Civil Rights movement was explicit in connecting to the Cold War context as decolonization got underway.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Mon, 07 May 2012 01:03:17 +0000

The British victory in the Seven Years War, in the medium run, was pretty disastrous for the British Empire itself, at least in the North American sphere. Binary and adversarial hegemons tend to get interlocked in all sorts of ways that don’t become apparent until one of them topples or is razed. Sort of like Victorian twin-houses in shabbily-genteel parts of some cities. A lot of rotten brick at the interface is hidden behind regular upgrading of the trim on both sides of the imaginary line. But here I depart even farther from anything I actually know anything about, and the onset of the grading frenzy this weekend has still kept me from reading the underlying post.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Sun, 06 May 2012 20:59:27 +0000

“I saw no evidence in the post that the existence of the USSR rather than US domestic concerns were the cause of economic regulation. . . “

Otto, it’s a brief blog post, not a research paper. It’s fine to disagree with Echidne–I thought it was an interesting observation.

By: J. Otto Pohl

J. Otto Pohl — Sun, 06 May 2012 16:41:16 +0000

I saw no evidence in the post that the existence of the USSR rather than US domestic concerns were the cause of economic regulation. Trade unionism developed in the US independent of events in the USSR. Again the causes for this development were almost entirely domestic not because of the existence of the USSR. Right to work states, existed during the Cold War. The first one was Arizona. So too did moving manufacturing overseas. The existence of the USSR did not stop a major shift in the production of goods from the US to Asia during the Cold War. In fact it probably hastened it as the US gave preferential treatment to the entry of goods from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan as part of its Cold War strategy. So the options of moving to right to work states and offshore existed and in fact were used by corporations while the USSR was at its zenith. Realistically American workers did not have a Soviet option nor did most of them want it during the existence of the USSR. It is only in some areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America that it was realistically possible to play the superpowers off each other. But, in retrospect the Soviet option was much more limited in reality than it appeared during the Cold War. Most of Africa for instance had already been locked into the world capitalist system during colonial times and not even the communist governments of Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique were able to break their economic dependence upon the US, Western Europe, and South Africa. If the Soviet option could not break Angola’s dependence on Chevron-Gulf or Mozambique’s dependence upon South African mining companies I fail to see how the mere existence of the USSR could restrain American capitalism within its domestic market.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Sun, 06 May 2012 16:07:12 +0000

I don’t think it’s so far-fetched. (Echidne is an economist, not a historian.) There’s a vast literature on the Cold War in the U.S. which suggests that the spectre of communism (versus the actual USSR) profoundly shaped a great deal of midcentury U.S. government policy and culture.

To me, it’s no surprise that trade unionism was at its height in this country during the Cold War. Now in the absence of CW competition, multinational corporations can crush the unions by moving mfg. offshore and/or locating to “right to work” U.S. states because workers worldwide have no alternative to neoliberalism.

I’m not nostalgic for the Cold War, nor am I a ComSymp. But surely it’s no surprise that superpower rivalries created a series of interlocking and sometimes surprising alliances, and that the victory of one side over the other means that a lot of people lose out when they can’t play one side against the other. (I’m thinking here of the British victory in the 7 Yrs. War, which was in the short and then the long run pretty disastrous for Native North Americans. The French were problematic allies to be sure, but the important thing the French offered was a *choice* in European allies.)

By: J. Otto Pohl

J. Otto Pohl — Sun, 06 May 2012 12:23:14 +0000

I understand that western intellectuals feel a need to rehabilitate the USSR, but I fail to see how US domestic regulation of the economy has much to do with Moscow. The Bolshevik Revolution was in 1917 and the USSR formed in 1922. During the 1920s the US had very unregulated economic activity resulting in the 1929 crash. It was the crash and Depression that motivated FDR’s New Deal not anything happening in the USSR. Indeed there was not much confrontation between the US and USSR during the 1930s. The Soviet Union was too busy dekulakizing peasants, starving to death Ukrainians, building the Gulag, and shooting people during this decade to have much influence on the US. Trying to link regulation under later presidents to the USSR seems even more far fetched. How exactly did the Brezhnev regime overseeing the era stagnation inspire or influence the Great Society programs of LBJ or the various economic regulations imposed by Nixon? Correlation is not causation and the fact that deregulation occurred in the US after the USSR collapsed does not mean the presence of the USSR prevented deregulation. If that blog post was an undergraduate essay it would have gotten F for failure to provide any evidence what so ever of its claims of causation.