Communist parties in Europe, ironically, played a similar role, and after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956, came increasingly to resemble the social-democratic parties they had so vilified. Social democracy reestablished itself, especially in Europe, as working-class reform parties committed to power sharing and the stabilization of capitalism. What in some cases began as mass revolutionary parties, soon degenerated into servants of the new state bureaucracy emerging under Stalin.ĭuring the period of the postwar boom following World War II, both social democracy and Stalinism experienced resurgence. These experiments quickly ran against the rocks of the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution in Russia, which found itself isolated and incapable of effecting a socialist transformation in an economically backward nation. The revolutionaries were nevertheless heartened by the example of a successful workers’ revolution and attempted to build new parties that could combine the day-to-day practice of fighting for reforms with the final goal of revolutionary transformation-without falling into either the trap of accommodating to “what existed” or becoming isolated, simon-pure revolutionaries. The brief period following the Russian Revolution of 1917 was one in which revolutionaries were stung by the betrayals of reformist social-democratic parties: their support for imperialism and war, and their adoption of a gradualist reformism. These reference points are now largely gone. Phenomenon of mass working-class parties with elected socialist officials accommodating to capitalism also produced syndicalist movements that explicitly rejected political action of the working class. Whether they were labor parties that sprang from union organization or socialist parties that arose independently or in tandem with the rise of trade unions, prior to World War I the existence of mass socialist working-class parties (and mass trade union movements) in several countries framed the discussion and debates in the movement about the relationship between the economic and political struggle, or the relationship between reform and revolution. This resistance has taken on many different forms-from industrial shop-floor resistance, to the formation of trade unions, to the formation of political parties-depending on the country, its course of development, and the characteristics of the working-class movement. The oscillation has given rise to popular and working-class resistance since the system’s birth, though the relationship is not always synchronized. Capitalism is a system whose history is marked by booms and slumps.
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