I'm reading Postwar, Tony Judt's history of Europe since 1945. There's a lot in there that sheds light on the present day. For instance, Britain was always reluctant about European integration. But Judt's account of Stalinism and the absorption of Eastern Europe by the USSR got me to thinking about the political culture of my youth. Communist parties never got any substantial political traction in Western Europe or North America, but communism in some form (small c intentional) was attractive to some intellectuals and committed political activists.
Or I should probably say the label communism, or some conception of how Karl Marx's theories of history and political economy were applicable to our present situation, because in fact people in what we call the West* had no idea what was really going on in the U.S.S.R. and its puppet states. I would expect that hardly any one who adopted the label of communism or Marxism in the academy, or joined the Communist Party of the U.S.A. actually wanted to create a society that looked anything like actually existing Stalinism. By the way, neither did Marx. He was a better diagnostician than a clinician. His critique of 19th Century capitalism was astute and provided a useful framework for social analysis. However, his very confident predictions of the future were very wrong, and he was always more than a little vague about how his imagined utopia would actually work. He would have been appalled had he been able to know what would be done in his name.
As the true nature of the Soviet Union became better understood in the West, communism lost its allure. Stalin died a year before I was born. His successor Nikita Khrushchev secretly denounced him to the Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, and his speech was leaked by the Israeli security service Shin Bet. As Wikipedi tells the tale:
The speech was shocking in its day.[2] There are reports that some of those present suffered heart attacks and that the speech even inspired suicides, due to the shock with all of Khrushchev's accusations and defamations against the government and the figure of Stalin.[3][failed verification] The ensuing confusion among many Soviet citizens, raised on panegyrics and permanent praise of the "genius" of Stalin, was especially apparent in Georgia, Stalin's homeland, where days of protests and rioting ended with a Soviet army crackdown on 9 March 1956.[4] In the West, the speech politically devastated organised communists; the Communist Party USA alone lost more than 30,000 members within weeks of its publication.[5]
Nevertheless, Khrushchev made very limited changes to the Soviet system. The regime no longer practiced large scale terror, but it remained oppressive and economically backward. As the Soviet sphere became more transparent to outsiders, it lost more and more of its allure. Still, even in the 1980s I would occasionally meet people who thought the soviet state had something exemplary to offer us. I also met some former members of the CPUSA from whose eyes the scales had fallen. They had become communists because they truly believed that was the path to end oppression, injustice and inequality. That was still their passionate desire, but they knew they had been duped about how to get there.
I bring this up because it's instructive in general, but also to emphasize how utterly ridiculous and indeed offensive the Republicans are to be calling Kamala Harris a communist. There is absolutely no prospect that the United State will become anything remotely resembling a communist nation at any time in the imaginable future, and there is nothing whatsoever in the Democratic Party program that resembles communism in any way. If people need a primer about what Soviet Communism actually was, and how it worked, I can provide one. But I'd recommend that if you don't know, or only think you know, you should educate yourself.
*Russia is actually west of the U.S., obviously, but the division between East and West is a European construction of the world.
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