In the thread today on “Black Ribbon Day” I found it particularly interesting to experience how different the views were of a few posters from Central Europe on the legacy of Communism. Growing up in the UK, I found that many people – at least on the left – were happy to distinguish between different forms of socialism and communism.
Broadly I distinguished four main tendencies, though there are many others:
Labour (a broad church, socialist in name until 1995, but parliamentary and reformist, effective in achieving all kinds of reforms, but always accused of compromising with capitalist interests).
Communists who basically supported the USSR and Marxism-Leninism in the period from 1917-1956. I don’t know so much about them, but the general feeling was that the USSR was working and would soon overtake the capitalist states, ushering in a golden age. Since 1956, these communists are generally considered to have been misguided if not wilfully blind to the excesses of Stalin’s rule. Anyone who stayed true to the USSR after the suppression of the 1956 uprising in Hungary was known as a Tankie, and I never met an actual Tankie or heard a good word about them from anyone.
Western Marxists – basically an intellectual tradition, drawing on Marxist thought, but rejecting for the most part Leninst Party Vanguardism and often seeing the USSR as a disaster. They drew on Lukacs, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse) and in the post-war period were generally allied with movements like feminism, anti-racism, and other New Social Movements.
There were of course other traditions, such as Maoist-Third-Worldism and Trotskyism, which I don’t know so much about.
So how was it in your country? I am particularly interested to learn more about the differences between East and West, but also how different the UK experience was from that of people in other countries in the West and South (Italy, Spain and Portugal, Greece, the Balkans, Turkey etc).
And let’s keep it friendly, Comrades!