Apparently after the counterrevolution in the USSR there was a significant number of Western Marxists who actually rejoiced about this calamity, saying that finally Marxism had been liberated from the 'iron cage' of Marxism-Leninism and could now grow and prosper without the evil and controlling hand of the USSR hovering over it. In addition to being the kind of wildly ungrateful and nasty opinion that could only be held by people who see one of the greatest catastrophes for the left in modern history as a chance to promote their shitty micro party, it's also a take that has aged so badly as to rival Fukuyama's end of history.
More than a third of a century after the liberation of leftists from that 'iron cage', where exactly has the slew of glorious new revolutions built on innovative theories been? Why is every single major surviving and thriving socialist state led by a vanguard party that upholds the legacy of the Soviet Union as a monumentally positive influence? Why is the left, supposedly freed from the shackles of doctrine produced by an actual revolutionary superpower, struggling with a record degree of disorganization, alienation and dilution in the face of new fascisms?
The only 'liberation' that the fall of the USSR created for the left was the freedom to peddle ahistorical, revisionist and dilettantish nonsense dressed up in the robes of bold new theories, the freedom to engage in asinine debates on basic points clarified long ago by Soviet theory and practice, and the freedom to practice the kind of rank opportunism among imperial core leftists that leads inevitably into either malnourished social democracy or shameless social fascism.
Without seriously studying and examining the USSR in all its history- not just till Lenin's death, but right up to its final decade- as a serious socialist project that worked as a positive force in the world, made sincere attempts to combat imperialism, contended with serious internal and external issues of encirclement and revisionism that all successful socialist parties shall inevitably face, and produced, despite its ultimate failure, an incredibly diverse body of data and experience that is of vital educational value for the left, there will be no socialist movement that can surpass its achievements. The path beyond the USSR's era is not away from it, but through it, through an honest and comprehensive engagement with its tactics, struggles, errors, reversals and strategies, carried out from a place of deep engagement with the material and ideological conditions that it had to navigate, not with some projected fantasy of what it could have been.
If the seriousness required to do this is an 'iron cage', then it is the cage of material conditions that every socialist must contend with. What was lost with the fall of the USSR was not the cage, but the ability of countless workers across the world to even see the world beyond the bars, condemned to think of the cage as their whole world. If we are ever to break those bars, it shall only be through the study of those who came closest to doing so, and through the gaps in the world system of capitalism that they prised in order to allow the light of socialism to shine through.
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