I received a letter yesterday from my leftist penpal via the Multiverse Postal Service. We’ve been discussing the origins of the Cold War in our respective parallel universes. I quote from his lengthy missive below:
We both agree that the similar contours of our side-by-side worlds were consolidated after the disastrous Afghan war. But we each have differing timelines for the historical sequence of events starting from the February 1917 Russian Revolution that produced our present realities in our alternate universes.
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On August 30, 1918, a dissident, Cheka-based conspiracy to assassinate Lenin succeeded when a militant Left Social Revolutionary recruited for the purpose, Fanny Kaplan, shot and killed the Bolshevik Party leader. Authority in the Bolshevik Party transferred to the troika of Trotsky, Bukharin, and Tomsky, who reconciled Bolshevik and Menshevik factions into a strengthened Russian Social Democratic Labor Party by early 1919. The death of Lenin—the “Red Beast”—reverberated beyond Soviet Russia. When working-class social revolution erupted across Germany in October, 1918, the right-wing veteran Freikorps counterrevolution suffered from overconfidence. They succeeded in assassinating Spartakist leader Liebknecht in January, 1919. But Luxemburg and Jogiches survived to consolidate Berlin’s communist uprising. They managed to regroup the German Left into a revolutionary Red Front to provide effective leadership for the country’s inchoate workers’ insurrection by the spring of 1919. Their actions moved the ruling Social Democratic government decidedly to the left with the purge of its right wing in the early summer of 1919. Noske’s assassination that August proved the spur for the bloody civil war’s final phase which saw the suppression of the Freikorps by October, 1919, and the establishment of a council communist regime in central Europe.
The formation of a Soviet Germany broke the suffocating, imperialist cordon sanitaire around socialist Russia. Germany helped negotiate and monitor political settlements to the Makhnovist struggle for anarchist self-rule in the Ukraine and the Social Revolutionary-led peasant revolt in the Tambov region. German support for the Workers Group, Democratic Centralists, and Workers Opposition within the RSDLP, as well as for rebellious Kronstadt sailors and Petrograd workers under RSDLP attack, ensured a broad-based socialism for Russia. Right and Left Social Revolutionaries and sundry anarchist alignments rejoined a multi-party revolutionary Soviet government with Trotsky’s RSDLP by late 1920. With German assistance, this more democratic Russian revolution defeated the remaining White counterrevolution at some cost, and established a worker-and-peasant-run, pluralist socialist society by mid-1921. Russia and Germany then established a revolutionary confederation—initially called the Eurasian Socialist Commonwealth or Red Union for short—and pursued working-class intermarium policies regionally.
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The Red Union stretched from Germany through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and across Russia by 1936. Fascism took power in Portugal, France, Italy, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and the Balkans before the fateful Spanish civil war of 1936-1941. The vicious battle that carved up the Iberian Peninsula was prelude to a savage European war from 1942 to 1949. This bloody internecine conflict witnessed Britain and the United States ally with the Fascist Axis powers and Imperial Japan. Ultimately the victorious Red Union scoured Fascism’s remnants—Pétain’s Vichy France, Franco’s northern Spanish Nationalist redoubt, and Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic—from the European continent by 1951.
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As Fascism was driven from continental Europe, an apartheid America converted its alliance with Mosley’s United Kingdom and Hirohito’s Japan into a Mutual Defense Agreement. This renewed Axis eventually came to include Argentina, Uganda, Libya, and Myanmar, among other nations. Mao’s anarchist-communist guerrilla armies gained full control of mainland China from Japan by 1951—two years after the United Stated developed an atomic bomb. The libertarian communist Viet Minh defeated Axis forces in 1954, the same year Red Union scientists matched America’s nuclear achievement. Third World socialist liberation struggles continued to spread, primarily in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The conflict between the Red Union and the American-led Axis on the Korea peninsula left a divided Korean nation after almost a decade of brutal warfare. Britain attempted to move nuclear missiles to launch sites in Gibraltar, triggering an armed confrontation between massed Red Union and US-UK militaries on September 19, 1960. Britain agreed to remove the missiles and dismantle the missile sites on September 25. Concurrently, Castro’s focoist forces overthrew Batista in Cuba. Following the disastrous American-sponsored May 3, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the Red Union began building missile launching sites on the island of Cuba. US reconnaissance flights detected the construction and US President Nixon demanded the withdrawal of the missiles and imposed a naval blockade on Cuba on October 23, 1962. The Red Union agreed to dismantle the missile sites on October 28.
The Red Union and its mutual aid pact COMECON encompassed roughly a fifth of the world’s land surface and a third of its population by 1980. If the moderate social democratic welfare state countries of the Non-Aligned Movement were included, a third of the world and nearly half of its population lived in some form of socialist society. This socialist Second World squared off against a capitalist First World, which dubbed itself the Free World. Third World brush wars raged between the two contending political blocs across three continents. When Shah’s Afghanistan regime was overthrown in 1978 by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan in the Saur Revolution (April Coup) the Red Union made a serious mistake in backing the unrepresentative PDPA with aid and eventually troops. The nearly decade-long civil war that followed resulted in a tense stalemate between the Northern Red Alliance and an Islamist southern Afghanistan that independent observers considered a military and political defeat for the Red Union. This pivotal event led to the rise of political Islam and Islamist regimes across North Africa and the Middle East which were nominally allied with the Axis powers but often played the two competing political blocs against each other.
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The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first witnessed an uneasy détente between the Socialist bloc and the Free World, between the Red Union and the capitalist Axis powers, which continues to the present. Non-state hybrid socialist forms have recently emerged—the EZLN’s “mandar obedeciendo” in Chiapas, the SDF’s democratic confederalism in Rojava, and the OTF’s neo-Ujaama intercommunalism in Central Africa. But genocidal neo-Fascist movements and regimes have also appeared—the Islamic State in Bādiyat Al-Shām and the Khmer Bleue in western Kampuchea.
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That’s how struggles between socialism and capitalism played out on my side of the quantum divide.
This alternate history relies on the multiverse physics of Schrödinger and chaos theory’s butterfly effect trope. Thus it’s not a Marxist rendering of how a non-Stalinist Communism might have arisen based on an interplay of contending social forces. I’ve called capitalism the only game in town. Despite all its failings, “real existing socialism” proved to be the most enduring worldwide opposition to capitalism then and since. The fantasy of a genuine socialist alternative to capitalism is also intended to contrast with the Communist bloc fashioned by Leninism after 1917. Lenin reformulated Marx’s rough notions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, lessons from the Paris Commune, and lower vs higher stages of communism into a theory of the Commune State, the workers’ state, and the socialist state transitioning into non-state communism central to Bolshevism. Leninism considered the Soviet Union a workers’ state, but with Stalin’s rise to power Trotsky redefined it as a degenerated workers’ state. Mainstream Trotskyists labeled the Warsaw Pact, Cuba, China, et al, deformed workers’ states. Various conventional Trotskyist tendencies as well as anarchist, left communist, and libertarian Marxist currents riffed on Lenin’s own designation of his New Economic Plan as “state capitalism” to classify “real existing socialism” as state capitalist. Other more obscure Trotskyist tendencies came up with the ambiguous concept of bureaucratic collectivism to describe Stalinist regimes. And taking a cue from Otto Rühle some ultraleftists condemned Stalinism as Red Fascism.
The collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991 threatened to make the issue of how to characterize the Communist bloc a moot point. China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam are all that remain of the socialist Second World that once challenged the capitalist Free World for global hegemony. But as the Cold War witticism went, the Free World isn’t free and the Communist bloc isn’t communist. I often regret not having kept every bit of political ephemera I ran across during my life. I remember a faux quiz during the 1970s humorously designed to determine which tendency of the Left one belonged. One of the questions I remember asked: “When did Russia deviate from true socialism?” The multiple choice options included: “(a) 1917; (b) 1921; (c) 1922; (d) 1929; (e) 1956; or (f) it hasn’t yet, but we’ll be the first to denounce it when it happens.”
An in-depth discussion of how to analyze the worldwide political and economic bloc established by Stalin’s rise to power—not to mention whether it is historically accurate to draw a single direct line from Marx through Lenin to Stalin—remains for future columns.
SOURCES:
“Letter to ‘Lefty’ Hooligan” from G. Metesky, MPS postmark: 5-1-2021
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