At 24/09/2001 01:56, Michael Perelman wrote:
> Has any good come from the fall of the USSR?
>
>--
You don't have to buy into the "worse the better" thesis to see that the
fall of the USSR was inevitable (unbearably unpleasant as it may have been
for those of us with personal connections there and/or who lived thru it),
given the collapse of the Soviet economy and the complete political
bankruptcy of Soviet socialism. Perhaps it is better to acknowledge the
inevitable rather than live in a dreamworld. I have always thought that the
consequences would be cataclysmic, for reasons I have tried to set out here
and elsewhere many times before. The social and ecological cataclysm of
which the fall of the USSR was both symptom and catalysing cause has
already embraced hundreds of millions of people; all that has happened now
is that it has begun to hit hard in the core capitalist states, too. It
seems almost banally obvious that late capitalism is radically unstable,
and therefore the avalanche of change has only begun to sweep down on the
West. Huge transformations and powerful, open struggles are simply
inevitable. No-one can avoid being affected by this process of sweeping
change, which is certain to invade every aspect of our lives. As Trotsky
famously said, "You may not be interested in the war, but the war is
interested in you". There will be no hiding place, and no fence-sitting.
People will have to take sides--events will force them to--and we shall
have to be a little more partisan than we perhaps have been. People will
have to learn to make sacrifices to aid the causes they believe in.
Sacrifices will be imposed by hostile circumstances anyway, so it is a sign
of political courage and of a hunger for freedom and real social
emancipation that we should try to elect what sacrifices we bear rather
than simply be the unwilling but passive victims of adversity.
Mark
