The unprecedented success of Bernie Sanders’s run and his enduring popularity should have been a wake-up call to much of Leftworld: the country is ready for working-class politics, and even for the s-word, as long as we talk about it in everyday, tangible terms.

And yet, much of the radical left learned the opposite lesson from 2016. We have been staking out increasingly wilder terrain, moving the goalposts well beyond what most of the last century’s socialists or communists thought possible. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with horizons — we need them. But the basic challenge of left-wing politics is to train our eyes on horizons that others can see. Social democracy failed not because it traded utopianism for reform but because it swore off horizons entirely, and began to look inwards, upon its own parties and parliaments. In rhetoric, the radical left is different; but in practice, the mistake is similar: victory is defined as whatever makes the already-initiated tick. Ultra-leftism and reformism are united by their scorn for mass action.

Now transformed into a small minority, the Right srs and Mensheviks attacked the Bolshevik action. Even Martov denounced the “coup d’état,” but also put forth a resolution calling for an interim all-Soviet government and plans for a constituent assembly. Many Bolsheviks supported the motion and it carried unanimously. Martov’s plan would have created the broad socialist government that many had sought in September— only now, in a more radical context, it would be pressured into taking principled positions on the war and land reform

But as in September, the Right SRs and the Menshevik majority refused to go along. They walked out of the Congress, ceding the revolution’s future to the Bolsheviks. Martov still wanted a compromise — negotiations for the creation of a coalition socialist government. But now, just two hours later, with the moderates no longer in the hall, the Bolshevik mood hardened. “The rising of the masses of the people requires no justification,” Trotsky lectured his former comrade bitingly from the floor. “No, here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we must say: you are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out. Go where you ought to go: into the dustbin of history!”

With respect to the relations of the Soviet Union to the Communist Parties in the West, a discussion seems to be taking place in Russia regarding what advantage the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Communist Parties can make of the so-called crisis of capitalism. They can’t agree. Their press indicates this. Also there is a doctrinal difference on whether they should accept alliances with left-wing parties. This too came out in their specialized press.

In this sense, the developments in the Eastern Bloc countries played a decisive role in breaking up the Soviet Union. Most important in this regard was Gorbachev’s explicit reversal of the Brezhnev doctrine, making clear that the USSR would not intervene to shore up the beleaguered Eastern Bloc regimes. The debt crisis in the late 1980s, and the resulting pressure on the price of consumer goods, only fed mounting street protests in countries like East Germany and Poland. In certain states these were partially animated by left-wing and independent trade union movements, but they were also shaped by a strong rejection of Soviet control.

On that occasion, I also escaped with merely probation. The editor-in-chief
ended the conversation with, what seemed for a moment, a
mischievous twinkle in his eyes: Since you proved yourself entirely incapable
of writing anything publishable in the Soviet press about East Africa, we are
sending you to West Siberia. Try to write something more upbeat about the
summer construction brigades of student volunteers who are helping build
homes for the wounded internationalist fighters returning from Afghanistan.

Needless to say, I failed that assignment too. A group of young Sandinistas
from Nicaragua, who studied engineering at a famous technological
university in Moscow, stopped my interview with a bitter question in
Spanish: Compañero, if all this disorganization, drinking, and corruption
that we are witnessing at this construction site is really a socialist planned
economy, then what are we fighting and dying for back in our country?

In capitalist societies, each nuclear family is thought to be a private entity, operating in opposition to each other and distinct from the state. Evangelicals might insist there be a patriarch at the head of that family, while liberals envision a broader spectrum of possible arrangements. But the family form is the same: atomized, and financially self-reliant. The child is the responsibility of the parents who almost solely invested in her, and parents are expected to vigilantly monitor risks to their investment, even when they aren’t around. If your child is harmed or becomes ill, damage has been done to you, not to society, and it’s your job to fix it

In capitalist societies like the United States, where public schools are increasingly used as tax-funded training camps for corporate workplaces, curriculum and standards focus more on preparing children for the demands of adulthood than on their immediate needs and development. Tech ceos from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg to Tim Cook have advocated that coding be taught starting as young as kindergarten, and policymakers like Obama agree (meanwhile, the trendiest private schools in Silicon Valley don’t allow computers in the classroom). In America, school is preparation for “real” life. In the early Soviet Union, the school was life; maybe even more real than the adult world outside its doors.